the stage, like a natural flower, obeying one of Guyau’s laws which says that, just as in the towering mountains there exists some corner where nature’s polyrhythm goes to echo and all the voices of the region convene, so too from human activity does a man emerge who encapsulates the tumultuous palpitations of the heart in his superior psychic vitality. Hence, Don Juan Tenorio. He undoubtedly corresponds to the simple basic essence of this figure of art, the real existence of a man, whom the people knew and tradition embellished with fantastic features and painted with the stunning lines of a rare psychological composition. Tirso took him to stage and, in this sense, Tirso was romantic.8 But Zorrilla modified him, because aside from presenting us with this figure onstage, with this universal character to whom we have alluded, he infused him with a vigorous spirit of Spanish Latinity; it is in this way that Don Juan Tenorio is the pure and loyal image of Spanish man, and this is why the work’s widespread reception has been so favorable. With regard to the formal art of the dramatic development, this is another powerful strength that has made the author’s thought ineradicable in the astonished imagination of all who speak Castilian. Everywhere someone is heard delightfully reciting portions of the verses from Don Juan Tenorio, due to the sublime simplicity of style, the familiar phraseological elocutions, and the trademark usage of the romance and hendecasyllable meters, which the Spanish hold so dear, as if those bits of harmony are themselves the beating of the Castilian breast.
And what can we say about El puñal del godo that we haven’t said already? The organizing dramatic idea of this poem does not have a different origin than that of Don Juan; it too is a flower of Spanish blood and sentiment; it too is the faithful representation of the social spirit of the epoch in which it was written, and this is why its genuine inspiration is the people, informed as it is by the legendary memories of medieval times.
In the second genre, Zorrilla maintains the romantic temperament of the motifs from his dramatic works. One could say that, with the miracle of his portentous genius in the legends, he has brought us the living breath of ancient platonic love from the grave, melancholic burial ground of medieval Spain, from the remote gothic monasteries, and from the burning, mystical, patriotic enthusiasm of the Cids and Pelayos. Never before did Spanish lyricism know how to gain momentum so energetically from the heated breath of the Iberian soul; never in its creations did it unfurl so completely the net of its distant glorious memories, nor did it endow such lucid beauty of local color and architectonic forms. Other poets might have created something better with regard to highbrow ideas, lineal perfection, and beauty in the visual tonalities, but no one has managed to copy with such fidelity the mysterious majestic mansions from the Middle Ages, full of unnerving penumbras and monastic abstractions, the dark stormy nights that plunge the rugged sierras of Spain into mourning, where the wind howls and a religious tone of spiritual sadness reigns. Finally, no one has managed to show us so clearly the ephemeral nuances of the race—the wild impetuses of falconry, the mildest winged swooning of tenderness, blind Christian fanaticism, vulgarity, violence, irreligiousness, criminal blood, and the martyr’s purple heart. Admire here a brushstroke of quintessential beauty in the execution of such idealization, when he paints the vision of Margarita la Tornera in the convent:
Pero con fulgor tan puro,
tan fosfórico y tan tenue,
que el templo seguía oscuro
y en silencio y soledad.
Solo de la monja en torno
se notaba vaporosa
teñida de azul y rosa
una extraña claridad.
Although some critics suggest that his traditions lack research with regard to philosophical speculations, this defect is completely nonexistent in the author’s lyric, no matter what portion of text one cites from his immense oeuvre. This contra is mistaken and unjust. Let he who says otherwise say so when Zorrilla pontificates and sings that
… la hermosa
es prenda que con envidia
el cielo dio, y con perfidia
por castigo a la mujer.
Y que quien cifra sobre ella
el bien del amor ajeno,
no acierto más que veneno
en su delicia verter.
It is easy to see in the literary endeavor of Zorrilla a common character identifiable in all his poetry—the dramatic form—no matter how imperceptible the perpetual dialogue may be, a circumstance that can be explained by the intense zest for life that the author wished to communicate and did communicate in all his works, the reason for which concurs so strongly with the dramatization of thought to the benefit of the clarity and vigor of his ideas.
No aspiro a más laurel ni a más hazaña,
que a una sonrisa a mi dulce España.
This is what the poet sang in his prelude, when he was inviting the reader to a tasting of his poetry:
las sabrosas historias de otros días.
In effect, whereas Espronceda lost himself in the national meaning of his inspirational themes, throwing himself into the world to harvest from the activity of the human spirit the eternal concerns, the perpetual agitation that makes him thirst for a solution to the metaphysical problems; while this colossus of spiritualist thought, confronting the odyssey of the century on his way toward the conquest of his ideals, was singing all the disillusions and all the doubts in a free, robust, burning, and booming intonation, like the thrust of life itself; Zorrilla, nostalgic for the infancy of his race, dreaming of legendary times of his people’s past, more Spanish than human, more patriotic than universal, put on the chords of his lyre the old fibers of the Castilian heart. That is why in his poetry, as we have already said, there prevails the ardent fantasy of the low latitudes, gold-plated melancholy of the meridian, fierce heroic impetuosity, consoling theology, and the instinctive sadness of the soul of Spain. In this sense, the oeuvre of the author of Don Juan marks the resurgence of Spanish classicism, insofar as all the arguments of his works are so genuinely portrayed from social reality that they resemble, as we have already said, projections of actuality, repetitions of events, ideas and feelings that have transpired on the stage of life.
Just look at the vital breath with which he is penetrating a thought that, exposed in another way, would have become figurative:
¿No es verdad que cuando a solas
hablo con vos, Don Rodrigo,
va vuestra alma en lo que os digo
como nave entre las olas,
esperando de un momento
a otro, verse sumergida
por la mar embravecida
de mi airado pensamiento?
And the energetic image of an attitude:
¿No es verdad que cuando clavo
mis ojos en vuestro rostro,
os hielo el alma y os postro
a mis pies como un esclavo?
And as for his technique? When we were speaking about Espronceda, we said that the preferred verse of romanticism in Spain has been the hendecasyllable, and Zorrilla shows us just this. For the most part his dramatic poems are developed in this metrical form, and in the secular assonant romance, which, as Piñeiro puts quite well, only on the Zorrillesque plectrum does the natural charm and untamed music thrive as it does in the Spanish cantares of heroic feats.
With regard to what of Zorrilla’s is relegated to the traditionalist genre, including the poems Granada and Al Hamar, there prevails almost exclusively the same combination of primitive measure, sometimes adorned with consonant rhyme that may diminish its value of spontaneity and finesse like the popular heroic meter, but it also enables it to gain auditory and melodic force, as well as a visual effect.
Therefore, without denying the guiding influence of Lamartine and Musset,9