THE AGE OF JUAN II.
1419-1454
Ayala's verse, the conscious effort of deliberate artistry, contrasts
with those popular _romances_ which can be divined through the varnish
of the sixteenth century. Few, if any, of the existing ballads date
from Ayala's time; and of the nineteen hundred printed in Durán's
_Romancero General_ the merest handful is older than 1492, when
Antonio de Nebrija examined their structure in his _Arte de la Lengua
Castellana_. Yet the older _romances_ were numerous and long-lived
enough to supplant the _cantares de gesta_, against which chronicles
and annals made war by giving the same epical themes with more detail
and accuracy. In turn these chronicles afforded subjects for _romances_
of a later day. An illustration suffices to prove the point. Every one
knows the spirited close of the first in order of Lockhart's _Ancient
Spanish Ballads_:—
"_Last night I was the King of Spain—to-day no King am I.
Last night fair castles held my train—to-night where shall I lie?
Last night a hundred pages did serve me on the knee—
To-night not one I call my own: not one pertains to me._"
The original is founded on Pedro de Corral's _Crónica de Don Rodrigo_
(chapters 207, 208), which was not written till 1404, and from the
same source (chapters 238-244) comes the substance of Lockhart's second
ballad:—
"_It was when the King Rodrigo had lost his realm of Spain._"
The modernity of almost every piece in Lockhart's collection were as
easily proved; but it is more important at this point to turn from the
popular song-makers to the new school of writers which was forming
itself upon foreign models.
Representative of these innovations is the grandson of Enrique II.,
ENRIQUE DE VILLENA (1384-1434), upon whom posterity has conferred a
marquisate which he never possessed in life.[5] His first production is
said to have been a set of _coplas_ written, as Master of the Order of
Calatrava, for the royal feasts at Zaragoza in 1414; his earliest known
work is his _Arte de trovar_ (Art of Poetry), given in the same year
at the Consistory of the Gay Science at Barcelona. Villena, of whose
treatise mere scraps survive, shows minute acquaintance with the works
of early _trovadores_; of general principles he says naught, losing
himself in discursive details. Early in 1417 followed the _Trabajos de
Hércules_ (Labours of Hercules), first written in Catalan by request
of Pero Pardo, and done into Castilian in the autumn of the year. This
tedious allegory, crushed beneath a weight of pedantry, is unredeemed
by ingenuity or fancy, and the style is disfigured by violent and
absurd inversions which bespeak long, tactless study of Latin texts.
Juan Manuel's dignified restraint is lost on his successor, itching
to flaunt inopportune learning with references to Aristotle, Aulus
Gellius, and St. Jerome. In 1423, at the instance of Sancho de Jaraba,
Villena wrote his twenty chapters on carving—the _Arte cisoria_, an
epicure's handbook to the royal table, compact of curious counsels
and recipes expounded with horrid eloquence by a pedant who tended to
gluttony. Still odder is the _Libro de Aojamiento_ (Dissertation on
the Evil Eye) with its three "preventive modes," as recommended by
Avicenna and his brethren. Translations of Dante and Cicero are lost,
and three treatises on leprosy, on consolation, and on the Eighth Psalm
are valueless. Villena piqued himself on being the first in Spain—he
might perhaps have said the first anywhere—to translate the whole
_Æneid_; but he marches to ruin with his mimicry of Latin idioms, his
abuse of inversion, and his graces of a cart-horse in the lists. No
contemporary was more famed for universal accomplishment; so that,
while he lived, men held him for a wizard, and, when he died, applauded
the partial burning of his books by Lope de Barrientos, afterwards
Bishop of Segovia, who put the rest to his private uses. Santillana
and Juan de Mena assert that Villena wrote Castilian verse, and Baena
implies as much; if so, he was probably a common poetaster, the loss of
whose rhymes is a stroke of luck. A Castilian poem on the labours of
Hercules, ascribed to him by Pellicer, is a rank forgery. Measured by
his repute, Villena's works are disappointing. But if we reflect that
he translated Dante, that he strove to naturalise successful foreign
methods, and that in his absurdest moments he proves his susceptibility
to new ideas, we may explain his renown and his influence. Nor did
these end with his life; for Lope de Vega, Alarcón, Rojas Zorrilla,
and Hartzenbusch have brought him on the boards, and he has appealed
with singular force to the imaginations of both Quevedo and Larra.
To Villena's time belong two specimens of the old encyclopædic school:
the _Libro de los Gatos_, translated from the _Narrationes_ of the
English monk, Odo of Cheriton; and the _Libro de los Enxemplos_ of
Clemente Sánchez of Valderas, whose seventy-one missing stories were
brought to light in 1878 by M. Morel-Fatio. Sánchez' collection,
thus completed, shows the entrance into Spain of the legend of
Buddha's life, adapted by some Christian monk from the Sanskrit
_Lalita-Vistara_, and popular the world over as the _Romance of Barlaam
and Josaphat_. The style is carefully modelled on Juan Manuel's manner.
The _Cancionero de Baena_, named after the anthologist Juan Alfonso
de Baena above mentioned, contains the verses of some sixty poets
who flourished during the reign of Juan II., or a little earlier.
This collection, first published in 1851, mirrors two conflicting
tendencies. The old Galician school is represented by Alfonso Álvarez
de Villasandino (sometimes called de Illescas), a copious, foul-mouthed
ruffian, with gusts of inspiration and an abiding mastery of technique.
To the same section belong the Archdeacon of Toro, a facile versifier,
and Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, whose name is inseparable from that
of Macías, _El Enamorado_. Macías has left five songs of slight
distinction, and, as a poet, ranks below Rodríguez de la Cámara. Yet he
lives on the capital of his legend, the type of the lover faithful unto
death, and the circumstances of his passing are a part of Castilian
literature. The tale is (but there are variants), that Macías, once a
member of Villena's household, was imprisoned at Arjonilla, where a
jealous husband slew the poet in the act of singing his platonic love.
Quoted times innumerable, this more or less authentic story of Macías'
end ensured him an immortality far beyond the worth of his verses: it
fired the popular imagination, and enters into literature in Lope de
Vega's _Porfiar hasta morir_ and in Larra's _El Doncel de Don Enrique
el Doliente_.
A like romantic memory attaches to Macías' friend, Juan Rodríguez
de la Cámara (also called Rodríguez del Padrón), the last poet of
the Galician school, represented in Baena's _Cancionero_ by a single
_cántica_. The conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan
II.'s wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV.'s wife, Juana, are destroyed by
chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned
in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and,
as some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk. His seventeen
surviving songs are all erotic, with the exception of the _Flama del
divino Rayo_, his best performance in thanksgiving for his spiritual
conversion. His loves are also recounted in three prose books, of
which the semi-chivalresque novel, _El Siervo libre de Amor_, is still
readable. But Rodríguez interests most as the last representative of
the Galician verse tradition.
Save Ayala, who is exampled by one solitary poem, the oldest singer in
Baena's choir is Pero Ferrús, the connecting link between the Galician
and Italian schools. A learned rather than an inspired poet, Ferrús
is remembered chiefly because of his chance allusion to _Amadís_ in
the stanzas dedicated to Ayala. Four poets in Baena's song-book herald
the invasion of Spain by the Italians, and it is fitting that the
first and best of these should be a man of Italian blood, Francisco
Imperial, the son of a Genoese jeweller, settled in Seville. Imperial,
as his earliest poem shows, read Arabic and English. He may have met
with Gower's _Confessio Amantis_ before it was done into Castilian by
Juan de la Cuenca at the beginning of the fifteenth century—being
the first translation of an English book in Spain. Howbeit, he quotes
English phrases, and offers a copy of French verses. These are trifles:
Imperial's best gift to his adopted country was his transplanting of
Dante, whom he imitates assiduously, reproducing the Florentine note
with such happy intonation as to gain for him the style of poet—as
distinguished from _trovador_—from Santillana, who awards him "the
laurel of this western land." Thirteen poems by Ruy Paez de Ribera,
vibrating with the melancholy of illness, shuddering with the squalor
of want, affiliate their writer with Imperial's new expression, and
vaguely suggest the realising touch of Villon. At least one piece by
Ferrant Sánchez Talavera is memorable—the elegy on the death of the
Admiral Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, which anticipates the mournful march,
the solemn music, some of the very phrases of Jorge Manrique's noble
_coplas_. In the Dantesque manner is Gonzalo Martínez de Medina's
flagellation of the corruptions of his age. Baena, secretary to
Juan II., in eighty numbers approves himself a weak imitator of
Villasandino's insolence, and is remembered simply as the arranger of
a handbook which testifies to the definitive triumph of the compiler's
enemies.
A poet of greater performance than any in the _Cancionero de Baena_ is
the shifty politician, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de SANTILLANA
(1398-1458), townsman of Rabbi Sem Tob, the Jew of Carrión. Oddly
enough, Baena excludes Santillana from his collection, and Santillana,
in reviewing the poets of his time, ignores Baena, whom he probably
despised as a parasite. A remarkable letter to the Constable of
Portugal shows Santillana as a pleasant prose-writer; in his rhetorical
_Lamentaçion en Propheçia de la segunda Destruyçion de España_ he
fails in the grand style, though he succeeds in the familiar with his
collection of old wives' fireside proverbs, _Refranes que diçen las
Viejas tras el Huego_. His _Centiloquio_, a hundred rhymed proverbs
divided into fourteen chapters, is gracefully written and skilfully
put together; his _Comedieta de Ponza_ is reminiscent of both Dante
and Boccaccio, and its title, together with the fact that the dialogue
is allotted to different personages, has led many into the error of
taking it for a dramatic piece. Far more essentially dramatic in spirit
is the _Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna_, which embodies a doctrinal
argument upon the advantages of the philosophic mind in circumstances
of adversity; and grouped with this goes the _Doctrinal de Privados_,
a fierce philippic against Álvaro de Luna, Santillana's political foe,
who is convicted of iniquities out of his own mouth.
It is impossible to say of Santillana that he was an original genius:
it is within bounds to class him as a highly gifted versifier with
extraordinary imitative powers. He has no "message" to deliver, no wide
range of ideas: his attraction lies not so much in what is said as in
his trick of saying it. He is one of the few poets whom erudition has
not hampered. He was familiar with writers as diverse as Dante and
Petrarch and Alain Chartier, and he reproduces their characteristics
with a fine exactness and felicity. But he was something more than
an intelligent echo, for he filed and laboured till he acquired a
final manner of his own. Doubtless to his own taste his forty-two
sonnets—_fechos al itálico modo_, as he proudly tells you were his
best titles to glory; and it is true that he acclimatised the sonnet
in Spain, sharing with the Aragonese, Juan de Villapando, the honour
of being Spain's only sonneteer before Boscán's time. Commonplace
in thought, stiff in expression, the sonnets are only historically
curious. It is in his lighter vein that Santillana reaches his full
stature. The grace and gaiety of his _decires_, _serranillas_ and
_vaqueiras_ are all his own. If he borrowed suggestions from Provençal
poets, he is free of the Provençal artifice, and sings with the
simplicity of Venus' doves. Here he revealed a peculiar aspect of
his many-sided temperament, and by his tact made a living thing of
primitive emotions, which were to be done to death in the pastorals of
heavy-handed bunglers. The first-fruits of the pastoral harvest live in
the house where Santillana garnered them, and those roses, amid which
he found the milkmaid of La Finojosa, are still as sweet in his best
known—and perhaps his best—ballad as on that spring morning, between
Calateveño and Santa María, some four hundred years since. Ceasing to
be an imitator, Santillana proves inimitable.
The official court-poet of the age was JUAN DE MENA (1411-56), known to
his own generation as the "prince of Castilian poets," and Cervantes,
writing more than a hundred and fifty years afterwards, dubs him
"that great Córdoban poet." A true son of Córdoba, Mena has all the
qualities of the Córdoban school—the ostentatious embellishment
of his ancestor, Lucan, and the unintelligible preciosity of his
descendant, Góngora. The Italian travels of his youth undid him,
and set him on the hopeless line of Italianising Spanish prose. A
false attribution enters the Annals of Juan II. under Mena's name:
the mere fact that Juan II.'s _Crónica_ is a model of correct prose
disposes of the pretension. Mena's summary of the _Iliad_, and the
commentary to his poem the _Coronación_, convict him of being the
worst prose-writer in all Castilian literature. Simplicity and
vulgarity were for him synonyms, and he carries his doctrine to its
logical extreme by adopting impossible constructions, by wrenching
his sentences asunder by exaggerated inversions, and by adding absurd
Latinisms to his vocabulary. These defects are less grave in his verse,
but even there they follow him. Argote de Molina would have him the
author of the political satire called the _Coplas de la Panadera_;
but Mena lacked the lightness of touch, the wit and sparkle of the
imaginary baker's wife. If he be read at all, he is to be studied in
his _Laberinto_, also known as the _Trescientas_, a heavy allegory
whose deliberate obscurity is indicated by its name. The alternative
title, _Trescientas_; is explained by the fact that the poem consisted
of three hundred stanzas, to which sixty-five were added by request of
the King, who kept the book by him of nights and hankered for a stanza
daily, using it, maybe, as a soporific. The poet is whisked by the
dragons in Bellona's chariot to Fortune's palace, and there begins the
inevitable imitation of Dante, with its machinery of seven planetary
circles, and its grandiose vision of past, present, and future. The
work of a learned poet taking himself too seriously and straining after
effects beyond his reach, the _Laberinto_ is tedious as a whole; yet,
though Mena's imagination fails to realise his abstractions, though
he be riddled with purposeless conceits, he touches a high level in
isolated episodes. Much of his vogue may be accounted for by the
abundance with which he throws off striking lines of somewhat hard,
even marmoreal beauty, and by the ardent patriotism which inspires
him in his best passages. A poet by flashes, at intervals rare and far
apart, Mena does himself injustice by too close a devotion to æsthetic
principles, that made failure a certainty. Careful, conscientious,
aspiring, he had done far more if he had attempted much less.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Castilian prose goes forward on Alfonso's lines. The
anonymous _Crónica_ of Juan II., wrongly ascribed to Mena and Pérez de
Guzmán, but more probably due to Álvar García de Santa María and others
unknown, is a classic example of style and accuracy, rare in official
historiography. Mingled with many chivalresque details concerning the
hidalgos of the court is the central episode of the book, the execution
of the Constable, Álvaro de Luna. The last great scene is skilfully
prepared and is recounted with artful simplicity in a celebrated
passage:—"He set to undoing his doublet-collar, making ready his long
garments of blue camlet, lined with fox-skins; and, the master being
stretched upon the scaffold, the executioner came to him, begged his
pardon, embraced him, ran the poniard through his neck, cut off his
head, and hung it on a hook; and the head stayed there nine days, the
body three." Passionate declamation of a still higher order is found
in the _Crónica de Don Álvaro de Luna_, written by a most dexterous
advocate, who puts his mastery of phrase, his graphic presentation
and dramatic vigour, to the service of partisanship. Perhaps no man
was ever quite so great and good as Álvaro de Luna appears in his
_Crónica_, but the strength of conviction in the narrator is expressed
in terms of moving eloquence that would persuade to accept the
portrait, not merely as a masterpiece—for that it is—but, as an
authentic presentment of a misunderstood hero.
After much violent controversy, it may now be taken as settled that
the _Crónica del Cid_ is based upon Alfonso's _Estoria de Espanna_.
But it comes not direct, being borrowed from Alfonso XI.'s _Crónica
de Castilla_, a transcript of the _Estoria_. The differences from
the early text may be classed under three heads: corruptions of the
early text, freer and exacter quotations from the _romances_, and
deliberate alterations made with an eye to greater conformity with
popular legends. Valuable as containing the earliest versions of many
traditions which were to be diffused through the _Romanceros_, the
_Crónica del Cid_ is of small historic authority, and Alfonso's stately
prose loses greatly in the carrying.
Ayala's nephew, FERNÁN PÉREZ DE GUZMÁN (1378-1460), continues his
uncle's poetic tradition in the forms borrowed from Italy, as well as
in earlier lyrics of the Galician school; but his mediocre performances
as a poet are overshadowed by his brilliant exploit as a historian. He
is responsible for the _Mar de Historias_ (The Sea of Histories), which
consists of three divisions. The first deals with emperors and kings
ranging from Alexander to King Arthur, from Charlemagne to Godfrey de
Bouillon; the second treats of saints and sages, their lives and the
books they wrote; and both are arrangements of some French version of
Guido delle Colonne's _Mare Historiarum_. The third part, now known
as the _Generaciones y Semblanzas_ (Generations and Likenesses), is
Pérez de Guzmán's own workmanship. Foreign critics have compared him to
Plutarch and to St. Simon; and, though the parallel seems dangerous, it
can be maintained. This amounts to saying that Pérez de Guzmán is one
of the greatest portrait-painters in the world; and that precisely he
is. He argues from the seen to the unseen with a curious anticipation
of modern psychological methods; and it forms an integral part of his
plan to draw his personages with the audacity of truth. He does his
share, and there they stand, living as our present-day acquaintances,
and better known. Take a few figures at random from his gallery:
Enrique de Villena, fat, short, and fair, a libidinous glutton, ever in
the clouds, a dolt in practice, subtle of genius so that he came by all
pure knowledge easily; Núñez de Guzmán, dissolute, of giant strength,
curt of speech, a jovial roysterer; the King Enrique, grave-visaged,
bitter-tongued, lonely, melancholy; Catherine of Lancaster, tall, fair,
ruddy, wine-bibbing, ending in paralysis; the Constable López Dávalos,
a self-made man, handsome, taking, gay, amiable, strong, a fighter,
clever, prudent, but—as man must have some fault—cunning and given
to astrology. With such portraits Pérez de Guzmán abounds. The picture
costs him no effort: the man is seized in the act and delivered to
you, with no waste of words, with no essential lacking, classified
as a museum specimen, impartially but with a tendency to severity;
and when Pérez de Guzmán has spoken, there is no more to say. He is
a good hater, and lets you see it when he deals with courtiers, whom
he regards with the true St. Simonian loathing for an upstart. But
history has confirmed the substantial justice of his verdicts, and has
thus shown that the artist in him was even stronger than the malignant
partisan. It is saying much. And to his endowment of observation,
intelligence, knowledge, and character, Pérez de Guzmán joins the
perfect practice of that clear, energetic Castilian speech which his
forebears bequeathed him.
An interesting personal narrative hides beneath the mask of the _Vida
y Hazañas del gran Tamarlán_ (Life and Deeds of the Mighty Timour).
First published in 1582, this work is nothing less than a report of the
journey (1403-6) of Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412), who traversed
all the space "from silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon," and more.
Clavijo tells of his wanderings with a quaint mingling of credulity
and scepticism; still, his witness is at least as trustworthy as Marco
Polo's, and his recital is vastly more graphic than the Venetian's.
A very similar motive informs the _Crónica del Conde de Buelna, Don
Pero Niño_ (1375-1446), by Pero Niño's friend and pennon-bearer,
Gutierre Díaz Gámez. An alternative title—the _Victorial_—discloses
the author's intention of representing his leader as the hero of
countless triumphs by sea and land. A well-read esquire, Díaz Gámez
quotes from the _Libro de Alexandre_, flecks his pages with allusions,
and—with a true traveller's lust for local colouring—comes pat with
technical French terms: his _sanglieres_, _mestrieres_, _cursieres_,
_destrieres_. These affectations apart, Díaz Gámez writes with sense
and force; exalting his chief overmuch, but giving bright glimpses
of a mad, adventurous life, and rising to altisonant eloquence in
chivalresque outbursts, one of which Cervantes has borrowed, and not
bettered, in Don Quixote's great discourse on letters and arms.
Knight-errantry was, indeed, beginning to possess the land, and, as
it chances, an account of the maddest, hugest tourney in the world's
history is written for us by an eye-witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena,
in the _Libro del Paso Honroso_ (Book of the Passage of Honour). Lena
tells how the demon of chivalry entered into Suero de Quiñones, who,
seeking release from his pledge of wearing in his lady's honour
an iron chain each Thursday, could hit on no better means than by
offering, with nine knightly brethren, to hold the bridge of San Marcos
at Órbigo against the paladins of Europe. The tilt lasted from July 10
to August 9, 1434, and is described with simple directness by Lena, who
looks upon the six hundred single combats as the most natural thing in
the world: but his story is important as a "human document," and as
testimony that the extravagant incidents of the chivalrous romances had
their counterparts in real life.
The fifteenth century finds the chivalrous romance established in
Spain: how it arrived there must be left for discussion till we come
to deal with the best example of the kind—_Amadís de Gaula_. Here and
now it suffices to say that there probably existed an early Spanish
version of this story which has disappeared; and to note that the
dividing line between the annals, filled with impossible traditions,
and the chivalrous tales, is of the finest: so fine, in fact, that
several of the latter—for example, _Florisel de Niquea_ and _Amadís
de Grecia_—take on historical airs and call themselves _crónicas_.
The mention of the lost Castilian _Amadís_ is imperative at this point
if we are to recognise one of the chief contemporary influences. For
the moment, we must be content to note its practical manifestations
in the extravagances of Suero de Quiñones, and of other knights whose
names are given in the chronicles of Álvaro de Luna and Juan II. The
spasmodic outbursts of the craze observable in the serious chapters of
Díaz Gámez are but the distant rumblings before the hurricane.
While _Amadís de Gaula_ was read in courts and palaces, three
contemporary writers worked in different veins. ALFONSO MARTÍNEZ DE
TOLEDO (1398-?1466), Archpriest of Talavera, and chaplain to Juan
II., is the author of the _Reprobación del Amor mundano_, otherwise
_El Corbacho_ (The Scourge). The latter title, not of the author's
choosing, has led some to say that he borrowed from Boccaccio. The
resemblance between the _Reprobación_ and the Italian _Corbaccio_
is purely superficial. Martínez goes forth to rebuke the vices of
both sexes in his age; but the moral purpose is dropped, and he
settles down to a deliberate invective against women and their ways.
Amador de los Ríos suggests that Martínez stole hints from Francisco
Eximenis' _Carro de la donas_, a Catalan version of Boccaccio's _De
claris mulieribus_: as the latter is a panegyric on the sex, the
suggestion is unacceptable. The plain fact stares us in the face that
Martínez' immediate model is the Archpriest of Hita, and in his fourth
chapter that jovial clerk is cited. Indiscriminate, unjust, and even
brutal, as Martínez often is, his slashing satire may be read with
extraordinary pleasure: that is, when we can read him at all, for his
editions are rare and his vocabulary puzzling. He falls short of Ruiz'
wicked urbanity; but he matches him in keenness of malicious wit, in
malignant parody, in picaresque intention, while he surpasses him as
a collector of verbal quips and popular proverbs. The wealth of his
splenetic genius (it is nothing less) affords at least one passage to
the writer of the _Celestina_. Last of all—and this is an exceeding
virtue—Martínez' speech maintains a fine standard of purity at a time
when foreign corruptions ran riot. Hence he deserves high rank among
the models of Castilian prose.
Another chaplain of Juan II., JUAN DE LUCENA (fl. 1453), is the
author of the _Vita Beata_, lacking in originality, but notable for
excellence of absolute style. He follows Cicero's plan in the _De
finibus bonorum et malorum_, introducing Santillana, Mena, and García
de Santa María (the probable author, as we have seen, of the King's
_Crónica_). In an imaginary conversation these great personages discuss
the question of mortal happiness, arriving at the pessimist conclusion
that it does not exist, or—sorry alternative—that it is unattainable.
Lucena adds nothing to the fund of ideas upon this hackneyed theme,
but the perfect finish of his manner lends attraction to his lucid
commonplaces.
The last considerable writer of the time is the Bachelor ALFONSO DE
LA TORRE (fl. 1461), who returns upon the didactic manner in his
_Visión deleitable de la Filosofía y Artes liberales_. Nominally,
the Bachelor offers a philosophic, allegorical novel; in substance,
his work is a mediæval encyclopædia. It was assuredly never designed
for entertainment, but it must still be read by all who are curious
to catch those elaborate harmonies and more delicate refinements of
fifteenth-century Castilian prose which half tempt to indulgence for
the writer's insufferable priggishness. Alfonso de la Torre figures by
right in the anthologies, and his elegant extracts win an admiration of
which his unhappy choice of subject would otherwise deprive him.
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Strictly speaking, this writer should be called Enrique de Aragón;
but, since this leads to confusion with his contemporary, the Infante
Enrique de Aragón, it is convenient to distinguish him as Enrique de
Villena. He was not a marquis, and never uses the title.