Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo

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This article is about the scholar. For the university, see Menéndez Pelayo International University. For the prize, see Menéndez Pelayo Prize.
Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo
One of the last portraits of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, taken by the photographer Kaulak.
Deputy to the Cortes
In office
1884–1886; 1891 – 1893
ConstituencyPalma and Zaragoza
Personal details
Born(1856-11-03)November 3, 1856
Santander
DiedMay 19, 1912(1912-05-19) (aged 55)
Santander
OccupationPhilologist, literary critic, historian, philosopher, poet
Signature

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo (Santander, November 3, 1856 – ibid., May 19, 1912)[1][2] was a prominent Spanish scholar, historian, literary critic and philologist.

He is considered one of the most significant intellectuals of Spain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His extensive body of work spans various disciplines and is devoted fundamentally to the history of ideas, the critical interpretation and historiography of aesthetics, Spanish literature and Hispanic American literature, and Hispanic philology.

Menéndez Pelayo also worked as a politician and cultivated poetry, translation and philosophy, and was even proposed for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biography

Studies, development and teaching

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo was born on November 3, 1856, on Calle Alta[3] in the municipality of Santander. He was the son of Marcelino Menéndez Pintado, professor of Mathematics at the Institute of Santander and Mayor of the city during the Progressive Biennium, and of María Jesús Pelayo y España;[4] he had three siblings: Enrique, Jesusa and Agustín.[5]

His brother Enrique recounts in his memoirs that at the age of twelve Marcelino stood in for his father in the mathematics chair, translated Virgil without a dictionary and read the History of England by Oliver Goldsmith.[6] He completed his secondary studies at the Cantabrian Institute of his native city, where he stood out for his prodigious memory. He subsequently completed his education at the University of Barcelona (1871–1873) under Manuel Milá y Fontanals; at that of Madrid (1873), where an academic arbitrariness on the part of Professor Nicolás Salmerón, who made his students repeat the year without even having examined them, was to make him a mortal enemy of post-Kantian Krausism and of the Hegelians in general; and in Valladolid (1874), where he became close to the man who would be his great friend, the conservative Gumersindo Laverde, who drew him away from his initial liberalism and steered him toward the most conservative party, that of the so-called Neo-Catholics or "neos". He made a study trip to libraries in Portugal, Italy, France, Belgium and Holland (1876–1877) and served as professor at the University of Madrid (1878) after passing before an examining board on which sat another great man of learning and critic, Juan Valera, whose nightly tertulia at his home he would later attend. Heterosexual in his conduct,[7] he lived and died a bachelor. By the time he reached fifty he was a man of obese build, and he consumed coffee to excess.[7] He died at his home in Santander in May 1912.[8] According to the diagnosis of the physicians who attended him in the last months of his illness, Doctors Quintana and Rodríguez Cabello, Menéndez Pelayo suffered from Laennec's atrophic cirrhosis, with abundant ascites.[9][10] Rodríguez Cabello, moreover, ruled out an alcoholic origin.[10][n. 1]

Most important offices

He was elected a member of the Royal Spanish Academy (1880), deputy to the Cortes (1884–1886 and 1891–1893),[12][13] was proposed for the Nobel Prize in 1905, and was a full member of the Royal Academy of History from May 13, 1883,[14] with the reading of the address La historia considerada como obra poética (History Considered as a Poetic Work). In this institution he was librarian from 1892 and director from 1910. He delivered his entrance address to the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, De los orígenes del criticismo y del escepticismo y especialmente de los precursores españoles de Kant (On the Origins of Criticism and Skepticism and Especially of the Spanish Precursors of Kant), on May 15, 1891,[15] and his entrance address to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando on March 31, 1901, nine years after being elected, in a hurried maneuver to be able to aspire to the directorship of the corporation.[16] Finally, from 1898 until his death in 1912, he was director of the National Library of Spain, succeeding Manuel Tamayo y Baus in the post.

In the political sphere, he held the office of senator for the University of Oviedo (1893–1899) and of senator for the Royal Spanish Academy (1901–1911).[17]

Thought

In politics he belonged to the Catholic Union of Alejandro Pidal,[18] and was a contributor to the newspapers La Unión (1882–1887)[19] and La Unión Católica (1887–1899).[20] The Traditionalists tried to win him over to their cause, for which purpose they argued with him using texts from his Heterodoxos. At a meeting he held in the early 1880s at the home of Cándido Nocedal with prominent Carlists linked to the Integrism of El Siglo Futuro, he declared: "in politics I will go wherever Pidal goes".[21]

Before he died he returned to his initial liberalism[citation needed], albeit anchored in solidly Christian points of view, and he corrected many of his earlier unfavorable judgments of Gaspar Núñez de Arce or Benito Pérez Galdós, who ended up being his friend and whom he supported in his admission to the Royal Spanish Academy.[citation needed]

Menéndez Pelayo is often associated with the Spanish Universalist School, mainly through his erudite and interdisciplinary approach, his defense of the humanist tradition and his influence on culture and education in Spain. His work reflects many of the principles of the Spanish Universalist School, which consolidates him as a fundamental figure in the history of Spanish and universal thought.

Praise

Caricatured in 1898 by J. Moya.

Endowed with a great capacity for work and a gifted intelligence, master of eight ancient and modern languages and possessor of a prodigious photographic memory, in his analyses of the form and substance of Spanish culture he identified the root of what is Hispanic with the Catholic tradition, especially that of the humanist Juan Luis Vives; despite this, he did not deny, conceal or fail to study everything unorthodox that Spanish culture produced, nor did he fail to assess its intrinsic importance. As a poet, his work is one of the most accomplished examples of the classical style in his century.

Legacy

He died in his native city, to whose municipality he bequeathed his rich private library of forty thousand volumes. His fellow countryman Ángel Herrera Oria, who considered himself to some extent his disciple, summed up his work in lapidary fashion: "He devoted his life to his homeland. He sought to place his homeland at the service of God". The newspaper El Debate and the Young Propagandists organized a tribute in his memory at the Teatro de la Princesa, attended by 3,500 people, filling the venue to capacity, at which the speakers included Ángel Herrera, Father Zacarías Martínez, Alejandro Pidal and Juan Vázquez de Mella, among others.[22]

Tomb in the Cathedral of Santander

The anti-liberal deepening of Menéndez Pelayo's thought, which found articulation on the political plane, was taken up during the Second Spanish Republic by the political culture of Spanish reactionary nationalism.[23] According to Pedro Carlos González Cuevas, the weight of his figure among the right-wing political traditions hindered the emergence of a nationalism of a secular nature in Spain.[24]

Within the framework of a seminar devoted to Menéndez, professors Felipe Pedraza and Rafael González Cañal (University of Castilla-La Mancha) did not hesitate to describe him as "the greatest connoisseur of our literary history who has ever existed", and they justify this statement by adding that "in the fifty-six years of his short life he carried out a Cyclopean labor, truly extraordinary, almost unbelievable".[25]

Menéndez was "notable for his wide erudition and his elegant and flexible prose... his studies of Spanish medieval, Renaissance and Golden Age literature remain invaluable".[26]

He is universally regarded as one of the most important historians of Spain, possessing an incomparable style and a great critical capacity.[27][28][29][30]

Disciples

Among his disciples, mention should be made of Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, editor of the Complete Works of Cervantes, among other works; the reformer of the Teacher Training Schools, Rufino Blanco Sánchez; the German Hispanist and biographer Ludwig Pfandl; the founder of Hispanic philology as a scientific discipline, Ramón Menéndez Pidal; and the professor of Aesthetics at the Complutense University of Madrid, José María Sánchez de Muniain, who compiled the Antología General de Menéndez Pelayo. Among women writers, his most accomplished disciple was Blanca de los Ríos. Although for reasons of age he never came to know him personally, Pedro Sainz Rodríguez —professor of bibliology at the Central University of Madrid and a great expert in mystical literature, as well as a scholar of his work— has been considered one of his principal disciples, through the teaching of Adolfo Bonilla.[31]

Criticism

Considered the most eminent figure of the casticista line, he is the foremost representative of the nationalist school in Spanish historiography.

A perfect connoisseur of European culture, a tireless worker, a writer of unsurpassable correctness and vigor, he would carry out a gigantic effort of research and exposition of our national culture, with which he shows himself to be radically identified.[32]

His studies and works constitute the most serious contribution of the Restoration era to the knowledge of the history of Spain.

The consideration of Catholicism as the axis and sinew of our national culture; the formidable documentary effort that backs each of his assertions; the polemical and passionate tone of many of his pages, explicable by the historical circumstances in which he had to forge his work; the breadth of spirit and the constant effort of human understanding are, perhaps, the most notable features of his personality and of his work.[33]

Statue of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo in the vestibule of the National Library of Spain.

Works

He wrote La ciencia española (1876), a vindication of the existence of a scientific tradition in Spain. Horacio en España (1877) is an analysis of the translations of Horace in Spanish literature, very much in keeping with its author's classicist tastes.

One of Menéndez Pelayo's most significant contributions is his multi-volume work entitled Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (1880–1882), still highly regarded today, in which he studies the Christian tradition through the history of Spain, from the Middle Ages to the end of the 19th century, and dissects the work of all the thinkers and writers persecuted by the Spanish Catholic tradition, adopting the point of view of Catholicism. In its second edition he corrected some of his points of view, but not, for example, his jocular comments and ironies against the Krausists and the Hegelians, especially against Emilio Castelar.

Historia de las ideas estéticas en España (1883–1891) is another fundamental work, in five thoroughly up-to-date volumes in which he explores, summarizes and reinterprets the existing bibliography on literary and artistic aesthetics in different periods of the Spanish cultural tradition. With this work Menéndez Pelayo highlights the unique contributions of Spanish culture to global intellectual history.

Menéndez Pelayo undertook three long works that would occupy him almost until his death. One is the publication of the Obras of Lope de Vega (1890–1902) in 13 volumes; the second is the Antología de poetas líricos castellanos (1890–1908), another 13 volumes devoted to medieval poetry except the last, dedicated to Juan Boscán, and which, despite its title, also includes epic and didactic poetry, turning the Antología into a true Historia de la poesía castellana en la Edad Media, as he titled it when reprinting it in 1911. The third is his study Orígenes de la novela, three volumes published in 1905, 1907 and 1910, with a fourth posthumous volume examining the imitations to which La Celestina gave rise in the 16th century. At the same time, he published Antología de poetas hispano-americanos (1893–1895), 4 volumes that are in reality a Historia de la poesía hispanoamericana, as he titled it when reissuing it in 1911. In this edition he corrected his assessments of Peru after contact with the Marquis of Montealegre de Aulestia. The 1911 work is a general study of all Hispanic American poetry that served to ingratiate the former colonies with the old and declining peninsular power; and he reprinted in 5 volumes his Estudios de crítica literaria (1892–1908) and some Ensayos de crítica filosófica (1892), in parallel with his appointment as director of the National Library in Madrid.

The Complete Works

The Spanish National Research Council published his Obras completas (Complete Works) in 1940, in 65 volumes, without including his correspondence and notes. There is, moreover, an edition on CD that includes, in addition to his Obras completas, his Epistolario (Correspondence) and his Bibliografía (Bibliography).

Historia de los heterodoxos españoles

Main article: Historia de los heterodoxos españoles
Photograph taken by Kaulak and published in Mundo Gráfico on the occasion of the death of Menéndez Pelayo in 1912

Undertaken at the initiative of Gumersindo Laverde, it dates back to his student years. Laverde had in mind only that his disciple write a series of sketches of famous Spanish heretics or heterodox figures. But, as always, in the hands of Menéndez Pelayo it became much more. The work came to eight volumes averaging more than 500 pages each. Its first edition was published by Cándido Nocedal at his Librería de San José, the publishing house of the Carlist newspaper El Siglo Futuro.[34] The first is a complete history of the spiritual life of Spain up to the 15th century, insofar as it departed from the teachings of the Church. The following ones deal with the Renaissance period, and analyze in detail the outbreak and spread of Protestant ideas in Spain and their repression by the Inquisition, and continue with the Judaizers and witchcraft during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Finally, it deals with the afrancesados of the 18th century, their philosophy and politics, and the penetration of anti-Catholic action in Spain; the influence of the French Revolution and of progressive liberalism; and it confronts, in phrases full of vigor, the doctrines and ideas of his contemporaries that he considers inadmissible, reproaching them for what he considers anti-Spanish activities.

Historia de las ideas estéticas en España

Main article: Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España

It is one of the fundamental works not only of its author but of modern historiography in general, as History of Ideas, and of the historiography of Aesthetics, not Spanish but Western, since to a great extent it deals with the latter as preparation for the former. The work is the result of the commitment the author made to his teacher, to whom he dedicates it, Manuel Milá y Fontanals, father of Aesthetics in Spain as a modern discipline, and it is intended to provide the theoretical foundation for the History of Spanish Literature, the central object of Menéndez Pelayo's unfinished project.

Antología de poetas líricos castellanos

It collects lyric poetry from its beginnings up to the Renaissance; it thus covers the whole of the Spanish Middle Ages, and his intention was to continue it so that it would have constituted a Historia general de la poesía lírica castellana. The anthology begins in volume IV of the edition of the Spanish National Research Council, which consists of ten; the first three (more than 1,100 pages) are devoted to introductory, biographical, critical and historical studies. From his pen we have perhaps the best portraits ever made of the Archpriest of Hita, of Enrique de Villena, of Jorge Manrique, etc., as he was able to revive and enliven the atmosphere of distant ages and penetrate to the root of events.

List of works

  • La novela entre los latinos (Santander, 1875). This was his doctoral thesis.
  • Estudios críticos sobre escritores montañeses. Telesforo Trueba y Cosío (Santander, 1876).
  • Polémicas, indicaciones y proyectos sobre la ciencia española (Madrid, 1876).
  • La ciencia española, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged (Madrid, 1887–1880).
  • Horacio en España (Madrid, 1877, 2nd ed. 1885).
  • Estudios poéticos (Madrid, 1878).
  • Odas, epístolas y tragedias (Madrid, 1906).
  • Traductores españoles de la Eneida (Madrid, 1879).
  • Traductores de las Églogas y Geórgicas de Virgilio (Madrid, 1879).
  • Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (Madrid, 1880–1882).
  • Calderón y su teatro (Madrid, 1881).
  • Dramas de Guillermo Shakespeare, translation (Barcelona, 1881).
  • Obras completas de Marco Tulio Cicerón, translation (Madrid, 1881–1884).
  • Historia de las Ideas Estéticas en España (Madrid, 1883–1889).
  • Estudios de crítica literaria (Madrid, 1884).
  • Obras de Lope de Vega (1890–1902).
  • Antología de poetas líricos castellanos desde la formación del idioma hasta nuestros días (1890–1908).
  • Ensayos de crítica filosófica (Madrid, 1892).
  • Antología de poetas hispano-americanos (1893–1895).
  • Historia de la poesía hispano-americana (Madrid, 1911).
  • Bibliografía hispano-latina clásica (Madrid, 1902).
  • Orígenes de la novela (Madrid, 1905–1915).
  • El doctor D. Manuel Milá y Fontanals. Semblanza literaria (Barcelona, 1908).
  • Obras completas (begun in 1911).
  • "Biblioteca de traductores españoles", in Obras completas (Madrid: CSIC, 1952–1953).

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ By contrast, the journalist Jesús Pardo (born 1927), in some memoirs in which he maintains that "one does not tell the truth but what one remembers to be the truth, which is not always the same thing", goes so far as to claim, without the slightest proof, that Menéndez Pelayo had been "a heavy drinker of anisette who frequented brothels and died of cirrhosis".[11]

References

  1. ↑ "Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo | Real Academia de la Historia". dbe.rah.es (in español). Retrieved 2022-05-17.
  2. ↑ Fallecimiento de Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo Newspaper archive of La Vanguardia. Edition of Tuesday, May 21, 1912, page 11 (in Spanish)
  3. ↑ Un poco de historia (LVII) - Las Calzadas Altas (in Spanish)
  4. ↑ Madariaga de la Campa, B., p. 29
  5. ↑ Anes y Álvarez de Castrillón, G., p. 88
  6. ↑ Menéndez Pelayo, Enrique (1983). "Memorias de uno a quien no sucedió nada" (PDF) (in español). Santander: Ediciones de Librería Estudio.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Vázquez de Quevedo 2015, p. 69.
  8. ↑ Vázquez de Quevedo 2015, p. 67.
  9. ↑ Mario Crespo López (2013): «Menéndez Pelayo y Cataluña», Fundación Ignacio Larramendi. Retrieved June 28, 2022. (in Spanish)
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Vázquez de Quevedo 2015, p. 72"When we saw him the diagnosis was clear: it was Laennec's atrophic cirrhosis, with abundant ascites"
  11. ↑ "Jesús Pardo publica unas corrosivas memorias sobre la España de posguerra". El País (in español). September 18, 1996.
  12. ↑ "Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. 35. Elecciones 27.4.1884". Archivo histórico de diputados (in español). Congress of Deputies.
  13. ↑ "Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino. 37. Elecciones 1.2.1891". Archivo histórico de diputados (in español). Congress of Deputies.
  14. ↑ Rodríguez Gutiérrez 2012, p. 127.
  15. ↑ Ribas 2015, p. 330.
  16. ↑ Rodríguez Gutiérrez 2012, pp. 130–131.
  17. ↑ Senado de España, Expediente personal del Senador (September 4, 2020). "Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino" (in español).
  18. ↑ "Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, de la Unión Católica". La Unión (in español): 2. October 15, 1882.
  19. ↑ "La Unión". Hemeroteca Digital (in español). National Library of Spain.
  20. ↑ "La Unión Católica". Hemeroteca Digital (in español). National Library of Spain.
  21. ↑ "La batalla de anoche". El Siglo Futuro (in español): 1. November 23, 1906.
  22. ↑ "El acto de ayer en el Teatro de la Princesa. Homenaje de los católicos á la esclarecida memoria de D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo". El Correo Español (in español): 1–4. June 10, 1912.
  23. ↑ Saz 2008, p. 163.
  24. ↑ González Cuevas 2008, p. 29.
  25. ↑ «La UCLM reivindica el legado de Menéndez Pelayo». Diariocrítico Castilla-La Mancha (October 30, 2012). Retrieved June 28, 2022. (in Spanish)
  26. ↑ «Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo». Britannica. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  27. ↑ «Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo». New Advent. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  28. ↑ «Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino», Escritores Cántabros. Retrieved June 28, 2022. (in Spanish)
  29. ↑ "Copia archivada" (in español). Archived from the original on September 7, 2017. Retrieved September 7, 2017.
  30. ↑ Ana Rodríguez de la Robla (March 11, 2006): «Regás contra Menéndez Pelayo», El Diario Montañés. Retrieved June 28, 2022. (in Spanish)
  31. ↑ This is acknowledged by José Luis Varela in his "Introducción" to the book by Pedro Sainz Rodríguez, Estudios sobre Menéndez Pelayo (1984), pp. 9–27.
  32. ↑ > José María Jover, p. 324
  33. ↑ > José María Jover, p. 324
  34. ↑ Ferrer, Melchor (1959). Historia del tradicionalismo español, tomo XXVIII, volumen 1 (in español). Sevilla: Editorial Católica Española S.A. p. 61.

Bibliography

Monographic bibliography

  • Pedro Aullón de Haro, "La recepción de la obra de Menéndez Pelayo y la creación de la Historia de las Ideas", in Analecta Malacitana, XXXVII, 1-2 (2014), pp. 7–39.
  • Javier García Gibert, "Humanismo y genio crítico en Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo", in Liburna. Revista de Humanidades, 5 (2012), pp. 57–120.
  • Antonio Lago Carballo (ed.), Sobre Menéndez Pelayo, II, Santander, UIMP, 2004.
  • José Luis García Delgado (ed.), Sobre Menéndez Pelayo, Santander, UIMP, 2003.
  • Pedro Laín Entralgo, Menéndez Pelayo y el mundo clásico, Madrid, Taurus, 1963.
  • Dámaso Alonso, Menéndez Pelayo crítico literario o las palinodias de Don Marcelino, Madrid, Gredos, 1956.
  • José María Sánchez de Muniáin, Antología general de Menéndez Pelayo, Madrid, La Editorial Católica, 1956. New edition Madrid, BAC, 2007, 2 vols.
  • Archivum, journal of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Oviedo, VI, nos. 1 and 2 (1956).
  • Florentino Pérez Embid (ed.), Estudios sobre Menéndez Pelayo, Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1956.
  • Pedro Laín Entralgo, Menéndez Pelayo, Buenos Aires, Espasa-Calpe, 1952; 2nd ed. Madrid, Espasa-Calpe, 1952.
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