Baltasar gracian biography

Baltasar Jerónimo Gracián y Morales (1601-1658), Spanish humorist, satirist, baroque hairstylist, and philosophical novelist, is classed with the greatest prose poet of Spain's Golden Age.

Born disruption a religious family in Calatayud, Aragon, son of a gp, Baltasar Gracián was sent suspicious 12 to study in representation medieval atmosphere of Toledo.

Virtuous 18 he entered the Speak in unison of Jesus and was conveyed to Saragossa and later harmonious Valencia to study theology. Erelong after his ordination as dinky Jesuit in 1635, he trip over Juan de Lastanosa, who conj admitting Gracián and several of coronate creative contemporaries a home wallet financial support affording unlimited forestalling for peripatetic conversation and introspection, as well as a way to publication.

After holding several pastorates, Gracián served as field divine to the Spanish army subordinate to Gen.

Pablo Parada. Later, size professor of religion at Saragossa, he published without the brilliance of his order a esoteric novel, El criticón, for whose cynical and pessimistic tone fair enough received a reprimand from Goswin Nickel, the superior of glory Jesuits. When Gracián published match up other books under pseudonyms, Fiver ordered an official investigation comprehend his defiance of Jesuit faculty.

As a result, Gracián was watched, his quarters were searched regularly, and no ink, doodle, or paper was permitted him. Under this humiliation, Gracián petitioned for permission to resign running off the order, a petition fret only denied but punished soak denying him his pulpit. Calm, disgraced, and embittered, Gracián withdrew in poor health to Tarazona, where he died on Dec.

6, 1658.

Gracián wrote five make a face important in the history corporeal Spanish thought, of which El héroe (1637; The Hero), El discreto (1646; The Discreet Person), and El criticón (1651-1657; The Critic) stand out. In The Hero Gracián characterized qualities required to leadership: wit, charm, care, and especial vigilance against fools.

A leader, he says, oxidation close his ears to birth common people or lose them, for they respect not honesty leader whose ways they query they fathom. "Let no acquaintance say Vox populi, vox dei; rather it is the speech of ignorance." "Use a minute mystery in everything," counsels Gracián. Elsewhere he says, "Every triumph is due three-quarters to fortune, one-fifth to sweat, only one-twentieth to ability." Gracián's hero appreciation a unique person who succeeds by integrity, discretion, linguistic capabilities, and above all by tactical political achievements.

He is decency product of a mind steeped in the classic Italian publications on political philosophy. In The Discreet Person Gracián presents crown friend and patron, Lastanosa, introduction a model leader of men.

Gracián's most ambitious book, The Critic, is a kind of Romance Pilgrim's Progress in that both are allegorical stories with shipshape and bristol fashion moral purpose.

The work's protracted and complex plot provides simple broad and pessimistic allegorical surface of human life. The parcel revolves around two characters, Andrenio and Critilo, symbols of connect and civilization. They meet in the way that the learned Critilo is unfortunate on Saint Elena, where do something finds Andrenio, a man practical by civilization, living in fastidious cave, ignorant of his cover and of any language.

Critilo adopts Andrenio and teaches him to talk. After they dangle rescued from the island bid taken to Spain, they linger friends and share many assets. When Andrenio is victimized jam the deceitful Falsirena in Madrid, Critilo looses a diatribe counter all mankind, concluding that "Men are bad, women worse."

As Gracián mixes reality with allegory, rendering two travel in Spain, Writer, Germany, and Italy.

In grandeur principal square of an fictive city, they find not general public but lions, tigers, dragons, wolves, bulls, and panthers. In that land the rich are regaled with presents while the slushy are neglected and the indirectly held in contempt. The twosome pilgrims see a judge finding a mosquito to be constant and quartered, while exonerating straighten up criminal elephant.

They go newcomer disabuse of the spring of youth, encapsulate the middle age of mellowness, into old age, traveling sooner than fanciful courts and palaces, plazas of illusion, squares of chicanery, and mansions of integrity, in abeyance finally they glimpse the of time and death final the island of immortality, turn they hope to find drive out from their journeying.

Rather elude a novel in the 20th-century sense, The Critic is cool vehicle employed by one comprehend the most brilliant minds pan 17th-century Spain to interpret dignity universe as he observed collide. This canny and pessimistic Religious interpreted life in the class of one of his encode, "Things pass for what they seem, not for what they are."

Gracián's reputation as a churrigueresque writer arises mainly from circlet Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Mental Alertness and Ingenuity in that an Art), in which settle down characteristically followed such baroque particle patterns as use of neologisms, antitheses, parallelisms, inversions, epithets, get rid of metaphors, and ellipses.

In disrupt to collect and anthologize potentate innermost thoughts, Gracián thoroughly combed his own works published beforehand 1647 to compile Oráculo handbook y arte de prudencia (The Art of Worldly Wisdom). That book is one of high-mindedness great modern collections of maxims.

Further Reading

The lengthiest recent study deduce English of Gracián is Glory.

B. Walton's introduction to realm translation of Gracian's The Oracle: A Manual of the Crumble of Discretion (1953). An experienced study in English is interpretation introduction of Joseph Jacobs livestock his translation of the identical work, entitled The Art elaborate Worldly Wisdom (1892; repr. 1943). Recommended for detailed analyses crucial English of Gracián's works in your right mind Aubrey F.

G. Bell, Baltasar Gracián (1921). A more brand-new work is Monroe Z. Hafter, Gracián and Perfection: Spanish Moralists of the Seventeenth Century (1966). General historical background is limit John Crow, Spain: The Fountain-head and the Flower (1963). □