Campoamor, Spain, and the World

Like the fame of Pardo-Baz?n, the reputation of Campoamor has suffered a rapid decline. The renown of the poet was flimsier and more ephermal than that of Spain's most notable woman writer. It contained more enthusiasm and less respect. Most of his prose works and many of his dramas died young, whereas D?na Emilia's infinitely more copious production was uniformly living and vigorous. The integral value of Pardo-Baz?n's work is beyond measure greater than that of Campoamor. Whereas the novelist deserves a splendid rehabilitation, the modicum of praise still accorded to the poet perhaps exceeds his merits. Apart from a few flashes of genius--to be found in his prose works--Campoamor is intelligently ordinary. This characteristic incidentally makes him most valuable for this study.

Campoamor offers a triple advantage as a lens through which to inspect the Spain of his day. Although he is now considered as a poet, his prose work, buried in oblivion--this is the first study to give it real attention--completes the authors' picture of him as a man who incorporated, in an admittedly ephermal way, all the spiritual and intellectual currents of his epoch: above all, the old religious traditionalism and the conflicting new scientific positivism. That Campoamor represented the feelings and the thoughts of the Spain of his time is proved by the enthusiastic applause with which his fellow-countrymen greeted his works. Finally, without being impeccably well-informed, Campoamor was deeply interested in the history and affairs of the world at large, and constantly strove to allot to Spain its correct place in his Weltanschauung.