Jovellanos and His English Sources: Economic, Philosophical, and Political Writings
John H. R. Polt
To my Parents
A few words about quotations and abbreviations: I have preserved the spelling and punctuation of editions contemporary with their authors but have modernized all quotations from subsequent editions where these had already departed from the original texts. This is the case of nineteenth-century editions of Jovellanos. I have also eliminated the italics which abound in Jovellanos' diaries and which are the spontaneous and generally pointless contribution of their editor. For the diaries' «Jardines» I have substituted «Jardine», since the latter is correct and we can have no certainty of what Jovellanos actually wrote.
I have used the following abbreviations for the most often cited works:
CHC Jovellanos. Curso de humanidades castellanas in Obras publicadas e inéditas. See O below.
D Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. 1953-1955. Diarios. 3 v., ed. Julio Somoza, estudio preliminar de Ángel del Río, índices y nota liminar de José María Martínez Cachero. Oviedo.
HCS Ferguson, Adam. 1767. An essay on the history of civil society. Edinburgh.
HU Locke, John. 1959. An essay concerning human understanding. 2 v., ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser. New York.
LA Jovellanos. Informe en el expediente de ley agraria in Obras publicadas e inéditas. See O below.
MJC Jovellanos. Memoria en defensa de la junta Central in Obras publicadas e inéditas. See O below.
MSA Manuscript collection of the public library of Gijón, Jovellanos' autograph. The number following indicates the carpeta or folder of the collection. Further numbers indicate the document's numbering within the folder, if any, and in some cases the corresponding número de orden in Somoza's Inventario (see References).
MSC Manuscript collection of the public library of Gijón, copy (usually by Julio Somoza) of original document by Jovellanos. Numbering system as for MSA.
O Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor de. 1858-1956. Obras publicadas e inéditas. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 46, 50, 85-87. 5 v., ed. Cándido Nocedal (1-2), Miguel Artola (3-5). Madrid.
TG Locke, John. 1960. Two treatises of government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge, England.
TTP Jovellanos. Memoria sobre educación pública, o sea tratado teórico-práctico de enseñanza in Obras publicadas e inéditas. See O above.
WN Smith, Adam. 1937. An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Ed. Edwin Cannan. New York.
Volume and page numbers are indicated by Arabic numerals. Large Roman numerals indicate a major division of a work (e. g., book, part); and small Roman numerals, except when preceded by «p.» or «pp.», refer to chapters or similar subdivisions. When these are further divided additional Roman numerals are separated by a period (e. g., WN, IV: iii.ii). Where the date of a diary entry has seemed relevant I have indicated it by abbreviating day, month, and year: 15.iv.95 = 15 April 1795. Diary references are, where possible, to D, the best edition; but references to the diaries 1801-1810, not included in D, are necessarily to O. For ease of reference I have shown the volume of O after shortened titles (e. g., LA 2: 90; Muselinas 5: 112b).
In the course of my work I have benefited from the generous financial support of the American Philosophical Society and the University of California; the assistance and encouragement of colleagues and friends at home and a broad, especially of D. José Caso González; the help of librarians in Berkeley, Santander, and Madrid, and of the very capable librarian of Gijón, D.ª Rosalía Oliver; and the useful comments and suggestions of my favorite critic, my wife. All these partners in this enjoyable task are as deserving of my gratitude as innocent of any errors of fact or judgment which my study may contain.
J. H. R. P.
The eighteenth century was in Spain a time of change; it had this in common with every other time in every other country. But it was a time of uniquely spectacular change, bracketed between civil wars accompanied by intellectual upheavals. By a curious complaisance of history the century began with a change of dynasty, a clean slate as it were; and Louis XIV, who had succeeded in obtaining the Spanish throne for his grandson, could boast, with only a dozen years of war ahead of him, that the Pyrenees no longer existed. A little more than a hundred years later Spaniards were fighting to prove that there were Pyrenees, ostensibly in defense of the rights of that same grandson's great-grandson, who in the meantime lived comfortably enough as the pensioner of his alleged oppressor. Intellectually also the era began and ended with its high points: Feijoo and Jovellanos.
Feijoo, the pioneer who planted the seed of the Enlightenment in Spain, lived and worked in Oviedo; Jovellanos, in whom that seed bore fruit, was born and exiled only a few miles to the north, in Gijón. Asturian by birth or by adoption, neither man ever set foot out side Spain; yet the philosopher-monk proudly called himself «ciudadano libre de la república de las letras», and the aristocrat-reformer's ideal was that his compatriots,
| (TTP 1: 253b) | ||
In an age of travel, the highest and best representatives of cosmopolitanism in Spain were two men who remained closely linked to one small province, but whose spirits knew no frontiers.
Jovellanos was a poet, a playwright, a critic of letters and architecture, an amateur of painting, a jurist, a statesman, an economist, an historian, and in all things an educator and a patriot. He was also -and he continues to be- something of an enigma. Controversial in his own time, he continued to be the subject of heated discussion long after most of his friends and enemies were forgotten. Carlists and republicans, priests and anticlericals, left, right, and center have interpreted his work; and from the time of his death until the present, no effort has been spared to claim him for this or that party. So Jovellanos is, depending on whom we read, a good Catholic, a heretical Jansenist, a Freemason, a revolutionary, a traditionalist, a modern traditionalist, or «el equilibrio». Too often he has be come a pawn in bitter ideological struggles; more than an author to be studied and understood, he has been a tactical position to be captured so that from it one may bombard the enemy. The fascination has remained, but the full verdict has not yet been rendered. It awaits the publication of all of Jovellanos' works, the preparation of a complete edition of authentic texts, the annotation of passages too long printed without comment -and the arrival of the perfect commentator, endowed with knowledge and a devotion balanced by objectivity. «No quiero que los que respiran, ni los que les sucederán, me tengan en más ni en menos de lo que valga», wrote Jovellanos to Posada in 1796 (O 2: 193b). Neither his own generation nor subsequent ones have quite lived up to his challenge1.
The present study explores one facet of Jovellanos' work: his relation to his English sources. By my use of «English» I would not be understood to exclude such eminent «North Britons» as Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson or the flamboyant Tom Paine, born in England, naturalized in America, and almost guillotined in France. For want of a more convenient term, I shall use «English» to speak of those books and men whose language is English; and in this I shall follow Jovellanos' usage. Jovellanos himself has also guided us by keeping a record of his readings in notes, letters, and above all in his diaries. We shall not add to this list but study the use made of English authors. Comparison will show what Jovellanos accepted from his readings and what he rejected, and will thus define the role of English sources in the most pertinent areas of his thought: economics, philosophy (particularly epistemology), and political theory.
Jovellanos left many reports, discourses, drafts, and notes dealing with separate aspects of the general questions that will concern us; and though we shall attempt no synthesis of all his work, some systematic exposition of his thought will be necessary in order to place his ideas in their context. At the same time, such works as the Informe en el expediente de ley agraria and the Memoria en defensa de la Junta Central, in which Jovellanos' ideas are most extensively developed, will receive special attention because they would lose part of their significance if not considered as a whole. The nature of our study further demands that without abandoning our principal objective we also take account of non-English sources.
The role played by English letters in the Spain of the eighteenth century has in the past been somewhat obscured by the more spectacular and undoubtedly more widespread influence of things French. The new dynasty was French; dances and dress followed French fashions; French authors were widely read and translated. Such contemporary critics of eighteenth-century society as Isla, Cruz, and Cadalso complained of gallicisms in speech and manners. Yet we should not let these attacks on afrancesamiento blind us to the existence of other influences; one cannot but suspect that their virulence was partly due to that hostility which can come to full flower only between neighbors. The same attitude may have led some nineteenth-century Spaniards to apply the contemptuous label of galoclásicos to a whole generation of authors and to see all that they objected to in the Enlightenment as a contagion spread from France.
In our own time this view is being balanced by increasing attention to English influences. Feijoo, we are now told, in spite of his thorough familiarity with French letters, «mira con clara prevención a Francia para dar toda su devoción a la cultura y el pensamiento inglés»2. We find that although English books had to contend against the vigilance of the authorities and against ignorance of the English language, neither of these obstacles was insurmountable. Prohibitions could be and evidently were evaded. Such authors as John Locke and Adam Smith could be read in French versions well before they were translated into Spanish. The study of the English language spread and received the support of so highly placed a Spaniard as Campomanes, who considered it «de suma importancia, para entender los excelentes escritores y providencias, relativas al fomento de la industria»3.
Thus what may have begun as a trickle became, by the end of the century, a stream. The present study of the influence of English sources on one of the leading members of Spain's enlightened élite will, I hope, further the interpretation of Jovellanos' thought and also contribute to the study of cultural relations between the Hispanic and the English-speaking worlds.
The education of Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos follows an itinerary which geographically leads from north to south, but which intellectually moves in the opposite direction. According to his biographer Ceán Bermúdez, he received in his native Gijón
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su primera educación, en Oviedo la xerga peripatética, en Ávila los principios de la jurisprudencia, en Alcalá el brillo de la beca, en Sevilla el primer rayo de los buenos conocimientos.4 |
Jovellanos was only twenty-four when in 1768 he came to Seville as a newly appointed magistrate. Fresh from the universities, he found himself drawn into a cosmopolitan group with far-ranging and decidedly «advanced» interests. The city, Ceán tells us,
| (18-19) | ||
To read English in the Spain of 1768 was a rare accomplishment5, and it opened the door to a new intellectual world. Jovellanos' guides into this world were Aguirre, with whom he still corresponded about English books years later while establishing his Real Instituto Asturiano, Martín de Ulloa, a fellow-magistrate and Sevillan patrician «que contribuyó mucho, en honor de la verdad, á su ilustración»6, and the asistente or governor himself . Don Pablo Antonio José de Olavide y Jáuregui (1725-1802), a native of Lima, where he had incurred ecclesiastical censure, had come to Seville in 1767 as governor of the city and superintendent of the new and in many respects revolutionary agrarian colonies in the Sierra Morena. He had impressive contacts with the enlightened faction in France: Voltaire was his friend, and Diderot later became his biographer. His library, according to Diderot, contained the works of Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau, Bayle's dictionary, and the Encyclopédie. These connections did not preclude Olavide's being receptive to English influences as well as French; and when shortly after his arrival in Andalusia his duties and interests led him to write an extensive report on the agriculture of that region, he held up English laws and practices for the imitation of his countrymen7. Whether or not Jovellanos' relationship with him can properly be called friendship8, our author's first and most decisive en counter with the thought of the French and English Enlightenment took place through Olavide and his circle.
In this period of his life Jovellanos first became acquainted with the writings of John Locke, which were to occupy his attention for many years. His diary for 1795 shows him reading the Essay Concerning Human Understanding with «intense attention» and «meditation» (1: 535, 543); and his library of later years contained a French translation, annotated by Jovellanos, of Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education9. But these books were not new to him. As early as 3 August 1776 Juan Meléndez Valdés wrote Jovellanos: «Al Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano debo y deberé toda mi vida lo poco que sepa discurrir»; and three years later he announced that he had received «el Tratado de educación de Locke»10. He assumed, and so can we, that Jovellanos already knew these works. Locke's Treatises of Government were translated into Spanish only after Jovellanos' death, and then only the second of the two, which also constituted the French version; but English editions circulated freely11. Jovellanos may have read the work either in English or in French, if not in both, and may have done so as early as his Sevillan period. A passage in the Tratado teórico práctico de enseñanza suggests that he knew it by 180212; but he did not clearly refer to it until 1810, when he complained that too many young men had uncritically accepted the political principles of «J. J., Mably, Locke, Milton y otros teoréticos que no han hecho más que delirar en política». A different version of the same letter is slightly less severe, separating Locke from Rousseau and Mably but still considering his ideas «poco a propósito para formar la Constitución que necesitamos» (O 4: 473b). Certainly Jovellanos never admired the Treatises of Government as he did the Essay, though his political thought was not as sharply divorced from Locke's as his comments suggest.
In Seville, and probably through Olavide and his friends, Jovellanos also came to read Montesquieu, whose Esprit des lois he knew by 1773, though he does not refer to it explicitly until 178013.
His relationship with Olavide came to an end in 1776 when the asistente was imprisoned by the Inquisition on charges which included possessing and lending prohibited books14. Two years later, shortly before Olavide's condemnation, Jovellanos paid tribute to the fallen reformer in his poetic vision of
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As late as 1794 Jovellanos publicly praised the agrarian colonies of the Sierra Morena and thus indirectly the then-exiled Olavide, who had been so closely connected with them (LA 2: 81a). Jovellanos was not a man lightly to forget or break a friendship, as his loyalty to the disgraced Cabarrús makes clear; and there may be merit in Cotarelo's conjecture that he contributed as minister of justice to Olavide's rehabilitation in 179816.
On 6 August 1777 Jovellanos, still in Seville, addressed a letter about economic matters (O 2: 139-143) to Don Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes, a fellow Asturian, author of several economic treatises, and a leading figure in the intellectual and political life of the capital. A year later he was himself transferred to Madrid, taking with him a knowledge of English and an acquaintance with some of the books and men who were shaping the Enlightenment; and upon his arrival he began to enjoy the powerful protection of Campomanes, who proposed him for membership in the Academy of History17. Campomanes, though writing before the publication of the Wealth of Nations, greatly admired the economic practices of the English. He recommended their study and the study of the English language to his countrymen and looked to British models when he proposed the establishment of the Economic or Patriotic Societies of Amigos del País18. Jovellanos knew at least his Apéndice a la educación popular by August 1777; and, if he had not read his other works before, he must have done so soon after obtaining the protection of so celebrated an author. Whatever the significance of Campomanes in Jovellanos' thought, the two men were poles apart in style and manner. Don Gaspar's elegant periods contrast sharply with the dry and monotonous prose of his compatriot, with his pedantic lectures on trivia, his ostentatious modesty, and his enormous vanity.
Through Campomanes Jovellanos met Francisco de Cabarrús, subsequently founder of the Banco de San Carlos, and like Jovellanos an amateur of economic science (Ceán, 26). A close friendship developed between the two men, lasting through all manner of vicissitudes in the life of each and broken only by Cabarrús' adherence to the Bonapartist faction in 1808. The economic views of the two were in some ways similar, though Cabarrús, in the letters he wrote his friend in 1792-179319, shows himself to be the more radical thinker. He was fond of drastic reforms and cherished grandiose visions of future perfection; outspokenly contemptuous of custom and tradition, here served his sharpest barbs for the church and hereditary nobility. Friendship for Cabarrús brought about Jovellanos' rupture with Campomanes when the latter refused to defend Cabarrús when he had fallen into disgrace. Thereafter Jovellanos, while asserting his continued respect for Campomanes' virtues, complained that the older man had never treated him as he deserved20.
Already in Seville, Jovellanos had not been reticent about violating the edicts of the Inquisition; but now, as a member of the Academy of History, he was allowed within rather ample limits to read and buy prohibited books. Such permission probably did not go unused; as soon as the Academy had received it, Campomanes compiled from the edicts of prohibition of the previous forty years a list of books to be acquired21. His membership in learned bodies also brought Jovellanos the opportunity of himself censoring books, including various works translated from the French and dealing with the recent American Revolution (O 5: 30 ff.) In 1784 he censored the duke of Almodóvar's Historia política de los establecimientos ultramarinos de las naciones europeas, an adaptation of Raynal, in which the British constitution and politics were to some extent explained (O 5: 41a). We have seen that he already knew Montesquieu's comments on the same subjects in the Esprit des lois. By 1781 Jovellanos had read Robertson's History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth; and in 1785 he expressed a favorable opinion of English novels, singling out «la historia de la señora Corisa Harlow [sic] y la del caballero Grandison»22.
During these same years Jovellanos first read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. In his diary for 25 May 1796 he noted:
| (2: 249) | ||
On 9 November of the same year «se concluye la lectura de Smith, y es la cuarta [sic]. Se[p]ties repetita placebunt» (D 2: 293). The English edition which Jovellanos gave to his friend the mathematician Pedrayes he had received from London late in 1790, and his reading of the anonymous French translation must consequently have taken place before that time23. On 22 April 1781 he recommended to the Economic Society of Asturias a number of works on economics, among them Condillac's Le Commerce et le gouvernement, considérés relativement l'un à l'autre, Cantillon's Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, Mirabeau, Bernardo Ward, Campomanes, and the «inestimable» works of Navarrete, Uztáriz, Ulloa, and other economists for whom his enthusiasm was later to diminish. He declared that he had translated Cantillon for his own use and would prefer him to all except Condillac (O 2: 440). Considering his later admiration for Smith, which led him to work on a compendium of his book and to exclaim in his diary, «¡qué admirable cuando analiza!»24 it is impossible to believe that Jovellanos could have known the Wealth of Nations in 1781 and not mentioned it on such an occasion. On 24 October 1784, however, he spoke of the English as «los mejores economistas del mundo» (O 5: 112b); and while the reference is not specifically to Smith, it suggests that something had happened to deprive Condillac and his countrymen of their position in Jovellanos' esteem. This was most probably the reading of one of the early editions of Smith in French.
The encounter with Smith may also explain Jovellanos' changed opinions of Spanish economists. Navarrete and Moncada, who in 1781 were «de un precio inestimable», Osorio and Martínez de la Mata, whose works had been «provechosas», are in 1788 condemned as ignorant quacks, together with a number of other economists of the seventeenth century. Uztáriz and Ulloa, who had merited unqualified praise before, are now deemed learned but too attached to their particular systems. Indeed, of all the economic writers before Charles III only Bernardo Ward, «un sabio irlandés, felizmente prohijado en [España]», keeps his place in Jovellanos' esteem (O 1: 313-315).
An anonymous work published in 1878 as Cartas político-económicas escritas por el Conde de Campomanes, primero de este título, al Conde de Lerena also belongs to the latter part of Jovellanos' stay in Madrid. These letters, found in manuscript among Jovellanos' papers, were apparently composed between January 1785 and January 1790. The claim that the letters are the work of Campomanes is today rejected, as is their earlier attribution to Cabarrús, particularly extravagant in view of their sharp attacks on that personage and the Banco de San Carlos; and most critics follow Colmeiro, who without explanation suggests León de Arroyal as the probable author25.
By the middle or late 1780's Jovellanos had come to know Adam Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, from which he quotes repeatedly. The earliest datable quotation is found in the Elogio de Ventura Rodríguez (1788); and somewhat free translations of another passage are found in the Memoria sobre espectáculos (1790) and the eighth letter to Ponz (1782-1792)26. Jovellanos' appreciation of Ferguson is indicated by his diary, which shows him reading the same Essay for the third time in 1796-1797 (2: 304, 315). Late in 1790 he received from the Marqués del Campo, at his own request, Ferguson's Moral Philosophy, which I take to be the Institutes of Moral Philosophy (Huici, 191-193); and in 1799 he read the same author's History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (D 2: 488).
Jovellanos' acquaintance with the works of Rousseau began during or before his Madrid period. In 1779 Meléndez was anxiously awaiting receipt of «el Emilio»27; and we can assume that Jovellanos, to whom he was writing, also knew it. This book, for which he later expressed high regard, left its mark on Jovellanos' educational treatises. By 1785 or 1786 he had also read La Nouvelle Héloïse28. In his later years Jovellanos became increasingly critical of Rousseau. In the Confessions he found sophistry and «impertinencias bien escritas, muchas contradicciones y mucho orgullo» (D 26.viii.94, 1: 479); and of the Lettres de la Montagne he wrote:
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... apenas hay cuatro dignas del autor del Emilio. Pueden ser justas sus quejas, pero muestra un espíritu suspicaz y quejumbroso y vano; el fondo bueno. |
| (D 7.x.94, 1: 495) | ||
Jovellanos does not mention the Contrat social until 26 March 1800, when he dissociates himself from a Spanish translation which included some laudatory references to him (O 5: 342). He certainly knew the work by that time and quite possibly as early as the Sevillan period.
When Jovellanos was reorganizing the Colegio Imperial de Calatrava in Salamanca, he urged the appropriate instructor to devise
| (O 1: 209b, §4) | ||
Thus by 1790 he knew something of the work of Adam Smith's teacher, probably of his System of Moral Philosophy. About the same time Campo wrote him from London to say that he could not find other works, not further identified, by the same author (Huici, 191).
If Jovellanos' contacts with English thought and letters had broadened during his years in Madrid, they did so even more after his courageous defense of Cabarrús forced him into a rupture with his protector Campomanes and an «honorable exile» of seven years in his native town. Gijón, though far from the capital, was by no means isolated in the latter part of the eighteenth century; on the contrary, it maintained lively commercial relations precisely with the English speaking world. Asturian coal was being exported to Philadelphia, whence wheat was shipped to Spain's American colonies. The coal itself had been discovered only recently and was being exploited with the aid of foreigners, mainly English. An Englishman, one Price, was operating a chinaware factory in Gijón and attracted Jovellanos' attention by his «innocent candor». British goods seem to have been sufficiently common to permit our author to write on a visit to Haro: «Corren aquí los géneros ingleses como en Gijón». This commercial importance of the town was officially recognized by the presence of a vice- consul, «Don Eduardo» Kelly, who contributed to the propagation of English letters in Gijón by distributing or lending such books as Joseph Townsend's Journey through Spain. In 1797 the consuls of France, «America» (presumably the United States), and Portugal visited the Real Instituto Asturiano which Jovellanos had founded29.
At the Institute, Jovellanos did his part to advance the knowledge of English, which was one of the two foreign languages taught at the school; and the importance of this study is stressed in his Tratado teórico práctico de enseñanza (1802) where after a defense of the importance of Latin for those intending to study in a university we read:
| (1: 248a) | ||
Jovellanos himself, regardless of whether or not he composed the Rudimentos de la gramática inglesa which follow the Curso de humanidades castellanas, took part in the English lessons of the Real Instituto Asturiano, supervising the translation of novels like Clarissa Harlowe and Frances Brooke's The History of Lady Julia Mandeville30. During these years in Gijón he also worked on his Spanish version of the first canto of Paradise Lost; ten years later, a prisoner on Majorca, he still welcomed the arrival of a bilingual edition of Milton31.
The English-speaking world also played an important part in the scientific interests of Jovellanos and his Institute. Benjamin Franklin, who enjoyed the esteem of enlightened Spaniards, was eulogized for his investigations32; and an acquaintance leaving for Philadelphia was charged with buying
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cualquiera obra buena y nueva que haya producido aquella nueva Academia de Ciencias, o los sabios del país, y el nuevo Código constitucional de la República. |
| (D 9.iv.97, 2: 337) | ||
The diaries repeatedly tell of orders for English books, sometimes executed by friends traveling abroad (e. g., 1: 495, 521, 522; 2: 21). The Marqués del Campo procured for Jovellanos, in addition to the works we have already noted, Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric, Gibbon's Decline and Fall, and the Moral & Political Dialogues &c. by one Dr. Hard (Huici, 193). Blair was to serve later as a guide in the preparation of lessons for the Real Instituto Asturiano33; and Gibbon was read through most of 1794.
During this period in Gijón, Jovellanos was introduced, probably by vice-consul Kelly, to Alexander Jardine, who was further to stimulate and direct his interest in English thought and writing34. This occurred at an inn in Oviedo on 11 November 1793. In his diary for that day, Jovellanos tells of his encounter with Jardine, British consul at Corunna, who had done military service at Gibraltar and in America, losing his left arm in our Revolutionary War. The two men seem to have found common ground at once:
| (D 1: 329) | ||
Both men immediately conversed on political and economic questions, with Jardine apparently advancing radical solutions which to the practical and realistic Asturian seemed unworkable. Jardine began at once to supply his new acquaintance with reading matter; later he sent him his own anonymously published Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, &c. by an English Officer (2 v., London, 1788). All of this foreshadows the course of their future relations.
Jardine's Letters show him to be on the whole a not unsympathetic observer, though one by no means exempt from his countrymen's usual prejudices against «papists» in general and Spaniards in particular. He admired Spanish painting and Spanish Gothic architecture, but in politics and economics Spain could serve only as a warning example of the effects of bad government and bad religion. Jardine believed that Spain's ancient institutions had been destroyed and that the Bourbons were in this respect no better than their predecessors. He knew the work of Campomanes; and while considering him «full of useful knowledge», he criticized his excessive attachment to French theoretical systems divorced from practice and to the «old prejudices» of mercantilism.
| (2: 79-82) | ||
«Civil and religious liberty» were for Jardine the great restoratives of national health and prosperity, though at the same time he questioned the possibility of democracy in Spain or France and feared extreme republicanism. Roads, canals, disentail, economic and educational reform -these were his watchwords in the Letters. They were sure to give him common ground with Jovellanos.
The two men were parted almost immediately, but they soon began a correspondence which was to last for three years. Through Price, Jovellanos received the promised Letters of Jardine, which he began to read in February 1794 and which he found «excellent» (D 1: 387, 500). Jardine now supplied Jovellanos with English books and periodicals which the Asturian read and circulated among his friends and from which he drew facts and ideas. As time went on, however, Jovellanos' initial reservations were reinforced. His letter «A desconocida persona» (O 2: 366-367), a draft intended for Jardine and prepared on 21 May 179435, warns his correspondent of writing too boldly and urges
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que escriba con alguna precaución. No es necesaria para conmigo (siempre que las cartas vengan por medio seguro); pero lo es para otros cuyos ánimos no estén maduros para las grandes verdades. |
Affirming his own hostility to the Inquisition and his desire for progress, Jovellanos insists that progress must be gradual and suited to existing conditions, not revolutionary; and he contrasts his position as a realistic reformer with that of the inventors of purely theoretical systems, e. g., William Godwin.
Four days earlier Jovellanos had written to Cabarrús «sobre el Derecho de propiedad y sistema de Godwin», intending to send a copy to Jardine36. This discussion took place some two years before Jovellanos had received «la célebre obra de Godwin, sobre la Justicia política, publicada en 1793, dos tomos folio» (D 12.vi.96, 2: 254). The most likely explanation for this knowledge is found in his account of his first meeting with Jardine, who gave him «otro inédito, y en todo original, ya impreso en este año, y obra de un amigo suyo, que acabaré de leer en este viaje». The discussion of Godwin which follows the meeting with Jardine and the connection which Jovellanos makes between Jardine and Godwin suggest that the manuscript which the consul gave his new acquaintance was a copy or at least a compendium of Godwin's Political Justice, which was, indeed, «ya impreso en este año», i. e., in February 1793. Jovellanos declared his intention of reading the manuscript «en este viaje», i. e., his trip to Pajares; and on 1 December 1793 he wrote: «Se pasa la noche leyendo en la Pública felicidad...» (D 1: 357), a title which the index to the diaries (D 3: 69a) does not identify but which reflects that of the 1793 edition of Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, and its influence on General Virtue and Happiness. We may then conclude that Jovellanos knew at least the essence of this work by the end of 1793 and that he owed this knowledge to Jardine. After receiving the printed version he reread and abstracted it (D 2: 351; Somoza, Inventario, 125, ord. 394).
Shortly after his meeting with Jardine, Jovellanos also read the Essay on the Right of Property in Land by William Ogilvie, «an ingenious inhabitant of North Britain», to use Godwin's phrase37. This work was in Jovellanos' hands by 14 May 1794 (D 1: 427). On 19 November 1794 (D 1: 509) he began to read the Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, whom Godwin had called «a most acute, original and inestimable author» (3: 257). The Rights of Man was borrowed from one D. José de la Sala, apparently a fellow-gijonés; with it Jovellanos received the Letter addressed to the addressers, on the late proclamation, in which he found Paine «chocarrero y de poco juicio» (D 1: 518). Through Jardine he obtained Paine's The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, which he began to read on 10 June 1796 and which he later translated38. Jovellanos knew of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which Paine attacks in the Rights of Man; but we can have no certainty of his reading it39. In May and June 1794 Jovellanos read an English translation of Condorcet's Vie de M. Turgot sent him by Jardine (D 1: 430 ff).
In spite of these readings, inspired at least in part by Jardine, Jovellanos' diaries begin fairly soon after their meeting to give evidence of a growing disagreement between the correspondents. We read such statements as «no me gustan ya sus ideas políticas, y menos las religiosas; distamos inmensamente en uno y otro» (1: 442) and «no apruebo sus ideas religiosas» (1: 446). About a year after the publication of his Informe en el expediente de ley agraria Jovellanos sent a copy to Jardine (D 2: 259); but by this time he had become very cautious with respect to the consul. A letter from Jardine bearing the British seal was apparently too compromising to be accepted (D 2: 237) -partly, no doubt, because of deteriorating relations between England and Spain, but perhaps also because of Jardine specifically. On 20 January 1797 Jovellanos returned from a short visit to Oviedo; and in his first mention of Jardine since the outbreak of war with Britain the previous October, he wrote: «Reveo la correspondencia enviada por Jardine; mañana, más despacio» (D 2: 313). The following day brings no relevant entry, but one is tempted to speculate whether Jovellanos was reading Jardine's letters with a view to destroying the most compromising. By April 1797, Jardine was, according to Jovellanos, no longer in Spain40; and in 1800, a year after the consul's death, Jovellanos referred to him as an «hombre a la verdad instruído, pero de grande extravagancia» (O 2: 343b). Thus ended the direct relationship between the two men, but not Jardine's influence in Jovellanos' thought. Although the Englishman had been too revolutionary for Jovellanos' taste, he had forced the Spaniard to define and defend his ideas when faced by what one might consider their logically extreme developments; and he had supplied him with many English periodicals and some significant books.
By no means were all Jovellanos' readings of this Gijón period English. In 1794 (D 1: 386, 451) we find him concerned with the Cours d'études pour l'instruction du Prince de Parme of Condillac, whose Le Commerce et le gouvernement he recommended in 1781 and whose Logique he also read in the 1780's41. In September 1795 Jovellanos was busy with Antonio Eximeno's plan of philosophical and mathematical studies42. Yet English titles, in addition to those already mentioned, abound in the diaries of the years in Gijón. A biography of Bacon, histories by John Gillies and William Young, numerous accounts of travels, and an unspecified work by Goldsmith are mentioned between 1794 and 1798. The Encyclopaedia Britannica is consulted in 1796 and 1797; in the excitement of being named ambassador to Russia, Jovellanos read its articles on that country and St. Petersburg (D 2: 451).
Jovellanos apparently shared an admiration for things English which was widespread enough to prompt the Marqués del Campo to write him from England in 1790:
|
... quiero sacar a Vm. del error común y general por ese mundo adelante, sobre que en Inglaterra, todo es perfecto, todo se sabe, y todo se ejecuta a la maravilla. |
| (Huici, 190) | ||
This did not disillusion Jovellanos, who continued to cherish a never-to-be-realized wish to visit that country; and soon Campo wrote again:
|
En verdad, celebraré que llegue el caso de dar Vm. la escapadilla por los mares con el debido permiso, y si se deja ver por acá, yo le prometo una buena temporada. |
| (Huici, 193) | ||
The national stereotype of the «sabio inglés» appears alongside that of the «industrioso chino» in Jovellanos' Oración inaugural a la apertura del Real Instituto Asturiano (1794). But for all their effect on Jovellanos' thought, his readings and personal contacts with Englishmen did not make him a blind partisan of all things English. In 1795 he questioned Britain's motives in allying herself with Spain (D 2: 147); and in 1796 he applauded the newly declared war against the English, «un pueblo orgulloso, enemigo de la paz general» (D 2: 286). By the end of the century he was skeptical of the intentions of both major European powers. His hopes for France after Bonaparte's rise to the consulship («Si la última revolución de nuestros locos vecinos nos trae la paz, la llenaremos de bendiciones» [O 4: 218b]) were soon disappointed
| (D 2.i.00, 2: 494) | ||
The precipitate implementation of «la nueva Constitución bonapartina» led him to exclaim: «¡Qué plasta!, no parará en bien» (D 9.1.00, 2: 497). A year later, however, Jovellanos still hoped that England, «esta potencia orgullosa», would abandon her «proyectos de ambición y codicia» (D. 1.i.01, 2: 501).
England's struggle against Bonaparte, which eventually allied her once more with Spain, also brought Jovellanos into renewed contact with Henry Richard Vassall Fox, third Baron Holland. This prominent Whig peer, nearly thirty years younger than Jovellanos, had visited Gijón in 1792 and there met its most distinguished citizen, who gave him a copy of his play, El delincuente honrado. Holland seems to have conceived an immediate and lasting admiration and respect for Jovellanos. Six years later he sent him an English book; and when the Asturian was imprisoned on Majorca, Holland tried to negotiate for his freedom with Godoy and urged Lord Nelson to liberate him by force43. During these years of Jovellanos' imprisonment, Holland also published Some Account of the Life and Writings of Lope Félix de Vega Carpio (London, 1806) to which were appended a translation from Jovellanos' Memoria sobre los espectáculos y diversiones públicas and the following judgment on its author:
|
This treatise is the work of don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, late minister of grace and justice in Spain: a man, who, after having devoted the labours, and even the amusements, of his useful life, to the improvement and happiness of his fellow countrymen, is now languishing in the dungeons of Palma; imprisoned without an accusation, and condemned without the form of a trial.44 |
As soon as Jovellanos was released from his imprisonment, he began a correspondence with Holland which was to last until his death three years later and which consists of nearly two hundred letters. Holland was in Spain in 1809 and strengthened his friendship with Jovellanos, who was now a member of the provisional government carrying on the war against Bonaparte. On leaving, the young peer wrote in creditable Spanish:
| (O 4: 420a) | ||
In his memoirs, Holland later called Jovellanos «the most eminent» leader of the junta Central and declared that «great as were his intellectual endowments, his moral qualities were in unison with them».45 He commissioned a marble bust of his friend, and his secretary John Allen prepared an English translation of the Informe de ley agraria, which apparently was not published (O 4: 455a, 479b).
Lord Holland was a firm believer in representative government, large popularly elected assemblies, and a press free from prior censorship. In general, he was well satisfied with the institutions of his own country; and while he admired the Spaniards, he was sure that they could do no better than adopt British ways and British methods. He was so exasperated with their leadership that he wanted English and Austrian officers to take command of Spanish troops. About the merits of monarchy he was at best skeptical; to absolute monarchy he was frankly hostile; and of his own monarch, George III, he had an unflattering opinion. On the other hand, he admired the military genius and modesty of Washington; and he deemed Bonaparte, although the enemy of England and of Spain, «the greatest man of the age» and «the greatest prodigy of the times to which my notices relate».46
This democratically minded peer supplied Jovellanos with advice, encouragement, and reading matter during the last years of his life. The advice and encouragement chiefly concerned two points dear to Lord Holland's heart: the speedy convocation of a Cortes or parliament and the abolition of prior censorship of the press. In 1809 Jovellanos asked for the opinions of Holland and Allen on such matters as parliamentary procedure in Great Britain, the history of the Castilian Cortes, and the nature and advantages of bicameralism; and his friends were not slow in submitting their plans and ideas, though the details of these are not preserved in their correspondence. Jovellanos had highly recommended to the Englishman a new work by Francisco Martínez Marina47; and Holland sent Jovellanos a manuscript compendium of the procedures of the House of Commons and a copy of The Annual Register for 1806 (published in 1808). The latter, which included Holland's eulogy of his friend, was supposed to inform him about British politics and the British constitution (O 4: 347, 349, 376-421). With some apologies for its quality Lord Holland also forwarded Michael Geddes' account of the Cortes of 1390 and 1406, which Jovellanos found cursory but worth while48. Lady Holland, who accompanied her husband and shared his admiration for Jovellanos, sent him a copy of Peter Plymley's Letters (1807), Sydney Smith's defense of Catholic emancipation. This Whig clergyman had helped to found the Edinburgh Review, which earlier in that year of 1809 had reviewed a French version of Jovellanos' Informe de ley agraria. Holland, however, seems to have had nothing to do with this review; he mentioned it only after his return to London and then not favorably (O 4: 376b, 433b-434a). In addition to these works of a political flavor, the Englishman sent Jovellanos two novels «de su favorita Mrs. Radcliffe». Jovellanos' enjoyment of this lady's fiction was evidently a subject for good-natured teasing on the part of the Hollands, who subsequently promised to send him more «novelas de esa terrible Mrs. Radcliffe»; and there is no reason to suppose, as does Somoza, that these books were intended for anyone but Jovellanos himself49.
As might be expected, Jovellanos' references to England in his correspondence with Lord Holland are on the whole highly laudatory. That country is now his «segunda patria», «ese país de libertad», «ese país de justicia y libertad»; and he expresses confidence in the «conocida generosidad» and the «noble y firme carácter» of the English nation. Some notes of complaint do appear: the British government is exploiting Spain's desperate situation to extort commercial concessions, its conduct with regard to rebellion in South America is not above suspicion, and its aid to Spain is insufficient. «Jamás alianza tan fría y tan poco sincera se ha visto en la Historia» (O 4: 456b). In letters not addressed to Lord Holland, Jovellanos was even less sanguine. He complained that Spain's allies were abandoning her (O 4: 318a, 332b), and shortly before leaving Cádiz in February 1810 he warned his colleague Francisco Saavedra against British and American ambitions in the New World:
| (O 4: 493) | ||
Within a short time, however, the persecutions to which he and other members of the late Junta Central were subjected gave Jovellanos abundant proof of the in gratitude and duplicity of which his own countrymen were capable. Under these circumstances he clung to the hope of taking refuge in Holland House and going on from there to Spanish soil overseas (O 4: 460b, 462a); and to refute the accusations of usurpation directed against the former government, he invoked the witness of
| (MJC 1: 511b) | ||
In November 1811 the advancing French armies forced Jovellanos to flee from Gijón, whither he had returned in triumph the preceding 6 August. In his flight he carried with him a part of his library; and the contents of his baggage at his death later in the same month give a final testimony of his predilection for English letters: in addition to 31 unclassified manuscripts, there were 96 printed books in Spanish, 66 in Greek and Latin, 39 in English, 23 in French, 9 in Italian, and 1 in Portuguese50.
Jovellanos never visited England nor, indeed, any other foreign country. His sympathy for British governments was by no means unqualified. England, however, as the ally or the enemy of Spain, and English friends and English books played significant roles in all of his adult life. His interest was first awakened in the tertulia of Pablo de Olavide and was sharpened by contact with Alexander Jardine and Lord Holland and by his subsequent readings. The relationship between these readings and Jovellanos' own works will occupy us in the remaining chapters of this study.