noticed frequently in his writings and no one who reads his works
attentively can call him elitist, as have some of his calumniators.

Beautiful as Becquer's prose may be considered, however, the universal
opinion is that his claim to lasting fame rests on his verse. Mrs.
Humphrey Ward, in her interesting article entitled "A Spanish
Romanticist,"[1] says of him: "His literary importance indeed is only
now beginning to be understood. Of Gustavo Becquer we may almost say
that in a generation of rhymers he alone was a poet; and now that his
work is all that remains to us of his brilliant and lovable
personality, he only, it seems to us, among the crowd of modern
Spanish versifiers, has any claim to a European audience or any chance
of living to posterity." This diatribe against the other poets of
contemporary Spain may seem to us unjust; but certain it is that
Becquer in the eyes of many surpasses either Nuñez de Arce or
Campoamor, with whom he forms "a triumvirate that directs and
condenses all the manifestations of contemporary Spanish lyrics."[2]

[Footnote 1: _Macmillan's Magazine_, February, 1883, p. 307.]

[Footnote 2: Blanco Garcia, _op. cit._, vol. II, p. 79.]

Becquer has none of the characteristics of the Andalusian. His lyrical
genius is not only at odds with that of Southern Spain, but also with
his own inclination for the plastic arts, says Blanco Garcia. "How
could a Seville poet, a lover of pictorial and sculptural marvels, so
withdraw from the outer form as to embrace the pure idea, with that
melancholy subjectivism as common in the gloomy regions bathed by the
Spree as it is unknown on the banks of the Darro and Guadalquivir?"[1]
The answer to the problem must be found in his lineage.