in 1416;[539] Berenguer de Masdovelles, who seems to have flourished
soon after 1453;[540] Jordi, about whom there has been much discussion,
but whom reasonable critics must place as late as 1450-1460;[541] and
Antonio Vallmanya, some of whose poems are dated in 1457 and 1458.[542]
Besides these, Juan Rocaberti, Fogaçot, and Guerau, with others
apparently of the same period, are contributors to the collection, so
that its whole air is that of the Catalan and Valencian imitations
of the Provençal Troubadours in the fifteenth century.[543] If,
therefore, to this curious Cancionero we add the translation of the
“Divina Commedia” made into Catalan by Andres Febrer in 1428,[544]
and the romance of “Tirante the White,” translated into Valencian by
its author, Joannot Martorell,--which Cervantes calls “a treasure of
contentment and a mine of pleasure,”[545]--we shall have all that is
needful of the peculiar literature of the northeastern part of Spain
during the greater part of the century in which it flourished. Two
authors, however, who most illustrated it, deserve more particular
notice.
[539] Torres Amat, Memorias, p. 666.
[540] Ibid., p. 408.
[541] The discussion makes out two points quite clearly, viz.:
1st. There was a person named Jordi, who lived in the thirteenth
century and in the time of Jayme the Conqueror, was much with
that monarch, and wrote, as an eyewitness, an account of the
storm from which the royal fleet suffered at sea, near Majorca,
in September, 1269 (Ximeno, Escritores de Valencia, Tom. I. p.
1; and Fuster, Biblioteca Valentiana, Tom. I. p. 1); and, 2d.
There was a person named Jordi, a poet in the fifteenth century;
because the Marquis of Santillana, in his well-known letter,
written between 1454 and 1458, speaks of such a person as having
lived in _his_ time. (See the letter in Sanchez, Tom. I. pp. lvi.
and lvii., and the notes on it, pp. 81-85.) Now the question
is, to which of these two persons belong the poems bearing the
name of Jordi in the various Cancioneros; for example, in the
“Cancionero General,” 1573, f. 301, and in the MS. Cancionero in
the King’s Library at Paris, which is of the fifteenth century.
(Torres Amat, pp. 328-333.) This question is of some consequence,
because a passage attributed to Jordi is so very like one in
the 103d sonnet of Petrarch, (Parte I.,) that one of them must
be taken quite unceremoniously from the other. The Spaniards,
and especially the Catalans, have generally claimed the lines
referred to as the work of the _elder_ Jordi, and so would make
Petrarch the copyist;--a claim in which foreigners have sometimes
concurred. (Retrospective Review, Vol. IV. pp. 46, 47, and
Foscolo’s Essay on Petrarch, London, 1823, 8vo, p. 65.) But it
seems to me difficult for an impartial person to read the verses
printed by Torres Amat with the name of Jordi from the _Paris_
MS. Cancionero, and not believe that they belong to the same
century with the other poems in the same manuscript, and that
thus the Jordi in question lived after 1400, and is the copyist
of Petrarch. Indeed, the very position of these verses in such a
manuscript seems to prove it, as well as their tone and character.
[542] Torres Amat, pp. 636-643.
[543] Of this remarkable manuscript, which is in the Royal
Library at Paris, M. Tastu, in 1834, gave an account to Torres
Amat, who was then preparing his “Memorias para un Diccionario
de Autores Catalanes” (Barcelona, 1836, 8vo). It is numbered
7699, and consists of 260 leaves. See the Memorias, pp. xviii.
and xli., and the many poetical passages from it scattered
through other parts of that work. It is much to be desired that
the whole should be published; but, in the mean time, the ample
extracts from it given by Torres Amat leave no doubt of its
general character. Another, and in some respects even more ample,
account of it, with extracts, is to be found in Ochoa’s “Catálogo
de Manuscritos” (4to, Paris, 1844, pp. 286-374). From this last
description of the manuscript we learn that it contains works of
thirty-one poets.
[544] Torres Amat, p. 237. Febrer says expressly, that it is
translated “en rims vulgars Cathalans.” The first verses are as
follows, word for word from the Italian:--
En lo mig del cami de nostra vida
Me retrobe per una selva oscura, etc.,
and the last is--
L’amor qui mou lo sol e les stelles.
It was done at Barcelona, and finished August 1, 1428, according
to the MS. copy in the Escurial.
[545] Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 6, where Tirante is saved in
the conflagration of the mad knight’s library. But Southey is
of quite a different opinion. See _ante_, note to Chap. XI.
The best accounts of it are those by Clemencin in his edition
of Don Quixote, (Tom. I. pp. 132-134,) by Diosdado, “De Prima
Typographiæ Hispanicæ Ætate,” (Romæ, 1794, 4to, p. 32,) and by
Mendez, “Typographía Española” (Madrid, 1796, 4to, pp. 72-75).
What is in Ximeno (Tom. I. p. 12) and Fuster (Tom. I. p. 10) goes
on the false supposition that the Tirante was written in Spanish
before 1383, and printed in 1480. It was, in fact, originally
written in Portuguese, but was printed first in the Valencian
dialect, in 1490. Of this edition only two copies are known
to exist, for one of which £300 was paid in 1825. Repertorio
Americano, Lóndres, 1827, 8vo, Tom. IV. pp. 57-60.
The first of them is Ausias or Augustin March. His family, originally
Catalan, went to Valencia at the time of the conquest, in 1238, and was
distinguished, in successive generations, for the love of letters.
He himself was of noble rank, possessed the seigniory of the town
of Beniarjó and its neighbouring villages, and served in the Cortes
of Valencia in 1446. But, beyond these few facts, we know little
of his life, except that he was an intimate personal friend of the
accomplished and unhappy Prince Carlos of Viana, and that he died,
probably, in 1460,--certainly before 1462,--well deserving the record
made by his contemporary, the Grand Constable of Castile, that “he was
a great Troubadour and a man of a very lofty spirit.”[546]
[546] The Life of Ausias March is found in Ximeno, “Escritores
de Valencia,” (Tom. I. p. 41,) and Fuster’s continuation of it,
(Tom. I. pp. 12, 15, 24,) and in the ample notes of Cerdá y
Rico to the “Diana” of Gil Polo (1802, pp. 290, 293, 486). For
his connection with the Prince of Viana,--“Mozo,” as Mariana
beautifully says of him, “dignisimo de mejor fortuna, y de padre
mas manso,”--see Zurita, Anales, (Lib. XVII. c. 24,) and the
graceful Life of the unfortunate prince by Quintana, in the first
volume of his “Españoles Célebres,” Madrid, Tom. I. 1807, 12mo.
So much of his poetry as has been preserved is dedicated to the honor
of a lady, whom he loved and served in life and in death, and whom,
if we are literally to believe his account, he first saw on a Good
Friday in church, exactly as Petrarch first saw Laura. But this is
probably only an imitation of the great Italian master, whose fame
then overshadowed whatever there was of literature in the world. At
any rate, the poems of March leave no doubt that he was a follower
of Petrarch. They are in form what he calls _cants_; each of which
generally consists of from five to ten stanzas. The whole collection,
amounting to one hundred and sixteen of these short poems, is divided
into four parts, and comprises ninety-three _cants_ or _canzones_ of
Love, in which he complains much of the falsehood of his mistress,
fourteen moral and didactic _canzones_, a single spiritual one, and
eight on Death. But though March, in the framework of his poetry, is
an imitator of Petrarch, his manner is his own. It is grave, simple,
and direct, with few conceits, and much real feeling; besides which,
he has a truth and freshness in his expressions, resulting partly
from the dialect he uses, and partly from the tenderness of his own
nature, which are very attractive. No doubt, he is the most successful
of all the Valencian and Catalan poets whose works have come down to
us; but what distinguishes him from all of them, and indeed from the
Provençal school generally, is the sensibility and moral feeling that
pervade so much of what he wrote. By these qualities his reputation
and honors have been preserved in his own country down to the present
time. His works passed through four editions in the sixteenth century,
and enjoyed the honor of being read to Philip the Second, when a youth,
by his tutor; they were translated into Latin and Italian, and in the
proud Castilian were versified by a poet of no less consequence than
Montemayor.[547]
[547] There are editions of his Works of 1543, 1545, 1555, and
1560, in the original Catalan, and translations of parts of them
into Castilian by Romani, 1539, and Montemayor, 1562, which are
united in the edition of 1579, besides one quite complete, but
unpublished, by Arano y Oñate. Vicente Mariner translated March
into Latin, and wrote his life. (Opera, Turnoni, 1633, 8vo, pp.
497-856.) Who was his Italian translator I do not find. See
(besides Ximeno and others, cited in the last note) Rodriguez,
Bib. Val., p. 68, etc. The edition of March’s Works, 1560,
Barcelona, 12mo, is a neat volume, and has at the end a very
short and imperfect list of obscure terms, with the corresponding
Spanish, supposed to have been made by the tutor of Philip II.,
the Bishop of Osma, when, as we are told, he used to delight that
young prince and his courtiers by reading the works of March
aloud to them. I have seen none of the translations, except those
of Montemayor and Mariner, both good, but the last not entire.
The other poet who should be mentioned in the same relations was a
contemporary of March, and, like him, a native of Valencia. His name is
Jaume or James Roig, and he was physician to Mary, queen of Alfonso
the Fifth of Aragon. If his own authority is not to be accounted rather
poetical than historical, he was a man of much distinction in his time,
and respected in other countries as well as at home. But if that be set
aside, we know little of him, except that he was one of the persons
who contended for a poetical prize at Valencia in 1474, and that he
died there of apoplexy on the 4th of April, 1478.[548] His works are
not much better known than his life, though, in some respects, they
are well worthy of notice. Hardly any thing, indeed, remains to us
of them, except the principal one, a poem of three hundred pages,
sometimes called the “Book of Advice,” and sometimes the “Book of the
Ladies.”[549] It is chiefly a satire on women, but the conclusion
is devoted to the praise and glory of the Madonna, and the whole is
interspersed with sketches of himself and his times, and advice to his
nephew, Balthazar Bou, for whose especial benefit the poem seems to
have been written.
[548] Ximeno, Escritores de Valencia, Tom. I. p. 50, with
Fuster’s continuation, Tom. I. p. 30. Rodriguez, p. 196; and
Cerdá’s notes to Polo’s Diana, pp. 300, 302, etc.
[549] “Libre de Consells fet per lo Magnifich Mestre Jaume Roig”
is the title in the edition of 1531, as given by Ximeno, and in
that of 1561, (Valencia, 12mo, 149 leaves,) which I use. In that
of Valencia, 1735, (4to,) which is also before me, it is called
according to its subject, “Lo Libre de les Dones e de Concells,”
etc.
It is divided into four books, which are subdivided into parts, little
connected with each other, and often little in harmony with the general
subject of the whole. Some of it is full of learning and learned names,
and some of it would seem to be devout, but its prevailing air is
certainly not at all religious. It is written in short rhymed verses,
consisting of from two to five syllables,--an irregular measure,
which has been called _cudolada_, and one which, as here used, has
been much praised for its sweetness by those who are familiar enough
with the principles of its structure to make the necessary elisions
and abbreviations; though to others it can hardly appear better than
whimsical and spirited.[550] The following sketch of himself may be
taken as a specimen of it; and shows that he had as little of the
spirit of a poet as Skelton, with whom, in many respects, he may be
compared. Roig represents himself to have been ill of a fever, when
a boy, and to have hastened from his sick bed into the service of a
Catalan freebooting gentleman, like Roque Guinart or Rocha Guinarda,
an historical personage of the same Catalonia, and of nearly the same
period, who figures in the Second Part of Don Quixote.
[550] Orígenes de la Lengua Española de Mayans y Siscar, Tom. I.
p. 57.
Bed I abjured,
Though hardly cured,
And then went straight
To seek my fate.
A Catalan,
A nobleman,
A highway knight,
Of ancient right,
Gave me, in grace,
A page’s place.
With him I lived,
And with him thrived,
Till I came out
Man grown and stout;
For he was wise,
Taught me to prize
My time, and learn
My bread to earn,
By service hard
At watch and ward,
To hunt the game,
Wild hawks to tame,
On horse to prance,
In hall to dance,
To carve, to play,
And make my way.[551]
[551]
Sorti del llit,
E mig guarit,
Yo men partì,
A peu anì
Seguint fortuna.
En Catalunya,
Un Cavaller,
Gran vandoler,
Dantitch llinatge,
Me près per patge.
Ab ell vixquì,
Fins quem ixquì,
Ja home fet.
Ab lhom discret
Temps no hi perdì,
Dell aprenguì,
De ben servir,
Armes seguir,
Fuy caçador,
Cavalcador,
De Cetrerìa,
Menescalia,
Sonar, ballar,
Fins à tallar
Ell men mostrà.
Libre de les Dones, Primera Part del Primer Libre, ed. 1561,
4to, f. xv. b.
The “Cavaller, gran vandoler, dantitch llinatge,” whom I have
called, in the translation, “a highway knight, of ancient right,”
was one of the successors of the marauding knights of the Middle
Ages, who were not always without generosity or a sense of
justice, and whose character is well set forth in the accounts
of Roque Guinart or Rocha Guinarda, the personage referred to
in the text, and found in the Second Part of Don Quixote (Capp.
60 and 61). He and his followers are all called by Cervantes
_Bandoleros_, and are the “banished men” of “Robin Hood” and “The
Nut-Brown Maid.” They took their name of _Bandoleros_ from the
shoulder-belts they wore. Calderon’s “Luis Perez, el Gallego” is
founded on the history of a Bandolero supposed to have lived in
the time of the Armada, 1588.
The poem, its author tells us, was written in 1460, and we know that
it continued popular long enough to pass through five editions before
1562. But portions of it are so indecent, that, when, in 1735, it was
thought worth while to print it anew, its editor, in order to account
for the large omissions he was obliged to make, resorted to the amusing
expedient of pretending he could find no copy of the old editions
which was not deficient in the passages he left out of his own.[552]
Of course, Roig is not much read now. His indecency and the obscurity
of his idiom alike cut him off from the polished portions of Spanish
society; though out of his free and spirited satire much may be gleaned
to illustrate the tone of manners and the modes of living and thinking
in his time.
[552] The editor of the last edition that has appeared is
Carlos Ros, a curious collection of Valencian proverbs by whom
(in 12mo, Valencia, 1733) I have seen, and who, I believe, the
year previous, printed a work on the Valencian and Castilian
orthography.
The death of Roig brings us to the period when the literature of the
eastern part of Spain, along the shores of the Mediterranean, began
to decline. Its decay was the natural, but melancholy, result of
the character of the literature itself, and of the circumstances in
which it was accidentally placed. It was originally Provençal in its
spirit and elements, and had therefore been of quick, rather than of
firm growth;--a gay vegetation, which sprang forth spontaneously with
the first warmth of the spring, and which could hardly thrive in any
other season than the gentle one that gave it birth. As it gradually
advanced, carried by the removal of the seat of political power, from
Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Saragossa, it was constantly
approaching the literature that had first appeared in the mountains
of the Northwest, whose more vigorous and grave character it was ill
fitted to resist. When, therefore, the two came in contact, there
was but a short struggle for the supremacy. The victory was almost
immediately decided in favor of that which, springing from the elements
of a strong and proud character, destined to vindicate for itself the
political sway of the whole country, was armed with a power to which
its more gay and gracious rival could offer no effective opposition.
The period, when these two literatures, advancing from opposite corners
of the Peninsula, finally met, cannot, from its nature, be determined
with much precision. But, like the progress of each, it was the result
of political causes and tendencies which are obvious and easily
traced. The family that ruled in Aragon had, from the time of James
the Conqueror, been connected with that established in Castile and the
North; and Ferdinand the Just, who was crowned in Saragossa in 1412,
was a Castilian prince; so that, from this period, both thrones were
absolutely filled by members of the same royal house; and Valencia and
Burgos, as far as their courts touched and controlled the literature
of either, were to a great degree under the same influences. And this
control was neither slight nor inefficient. Poetry, in that age,
everywhere sought shelter under courtly favor, and in Spain easily
found it. John the Second was a professed and successful patron of
letters; and when Ferdinand came to assume the crown of Aragon, he was
accompanied by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman whose great fiefs lay
on the borders of Valencia, but who, notwithstanding his interest in
the Southern literature and in the Consistory of Barcelona, yet spoke
the Castilian as his native language, and wrote in no other. We may,
therefore, well believe, that, in the reigns of Ferdinand the Just and
Alfonso the Fifth, between 1412 and 1458, the influence of the North
began to make inroads on the poetry of the South, though it does not
appear that either March or Roig, or any one of their immediate school,
proved habitually unfaithful to his native dialect.
At length, forty years after the death of Villena, we find a decided
proof that the Castilian was beginning to be known and cultivated
on the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1474, a poetical contest was
publicly held at Valencia, in honor of the Madonna;--a sort of literary
jousting, like those so common afterwards in the time of Cervantes
and Lope de Vega. Forty poets contended for the prize. The Viceroy
was present. It was a solemn and showy occasion; and all the poems
offered were printed the same year by Bernardo Fenollar, Secretary of
the meeting, in a volume which is valued as the first book known to
have been printed in Spain.[553] Four of these poems are in Castilian.
This leaves no doubt that Castilian verse was now deemed a suitable
entertainment for a popular audience at Valencia. Fenollar, too, who
wrote, besides what appears in this contest, a small volume of poetry
on the Passion of our Saviour, has left us at least one _cancion_ in
Castilian, though his works were otherwise in his native dialect, and
were composed apparently for the amusement of his friends in Valencia,
where he was a person of consideration, and in whose University,
founded in 1499, he was a professor.[554]
[553] Fuster. Tom. I. p. 52, and Mendez, Typographía Española, p.
56. Roig is one of the competitors.
[554] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 59; Fuster, Tom. I. p. 51; and the
Diana of Polo, ed. Cerdá y Rico, p. 317. His poems are in the
“Cancionero General,” 1573, (leaves 240, 251, 307,) in the “Obras
de Ausias March,” (1560, f. 134,) and in the “Process de les
Olives,” mentioned in the next note. The “Historia de la Passio
de Nostre Senyor” was printed at Valencia, in 1493 and 1564.
Probably Castilian poetry was rarely written in Valencia during the
fifteenth century, while, on the other hand, Valencian was written
constantly. “The Suit of the Olives,” for instance, wholly in that
dialect, was composed by Jaume Gazull, Fenollar, and Juan Moreno, who
seem to have been personal friends, and who united their poetical
resources to produce this satire, in which, under the allegory of
olive-trees, and in language not always so modest as good taste
requires, they discuss together the dangers to which the young and
the old are respectively exposed from the solicitations of worldly
pleasure.[555] Another dialogue, by the same three poets, in the same
dialect, soon followed, dated in 1497, which is supposed to have
occurred in the bed-chamber of a lady just recovering from the birth
of a child, in which is examined the question whether young men or old
make the best husbands; an inquiry decided by Venus in favor of the
young, and ended, most inappropriately, by a religious hymn.[556] Other
poets were equally faithful to their vernacular; among whom were Juan
Escriva, ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns to the Pope, in 1497,
who was probably the last person of high rank that wrote in it;[557]
and Vincent Ferrandis, concerned in a poetical contest in honor of
Saint Catherine of Siena, at Valencia, in 1511, whose poems seem, on
other occasions, to have carried off public honors, and to have been,
from their sweetness and power, worthy of the distinction they won.[558]
[555] “Lo Process de les Olives è Disputa del Jovens hi del Vels”
was first printed in Barcelona, 1532. But the copy I use is of
Valencia, printed by Joan de Arcos, 1561 (18mo, 40 leaves). One
or two other poets took part in the discussion, and the whole
seems to have grown under their hands, by successive additions,
to its present state and size.
[556] There is an edition of 1497, (Mendez, p. 88,) but I use one
with this title: “Comença lo Somni de Joan Ioan ordenat per lo
Magnifich Mossen Jaume Gaçull, Cavaller, Natural de Valencia, en
Valencia, 1561” (18mo). At the end is a humorous poem by Gaçull
in reply to Fenollar, who had spoken slightingly of many words
used in Valencian, which Gaçull defends. It is called “La Brama
dels Llauradors del Orto de Valencia.” Gaçull also occurs in the
“Process de les Olives,” and in the poetical contest of 1474. See
his Life in Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 59, and Fuster, Tom I. p. 37.
[557] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 64.
[558] The poems of Ferrandis are in the Cancionero General of
Seville, 1535, ff. 17, 18, and in the Cancionero of Antwerp,
1573, ff. 31-34. The notice of the _certamen_ of 1511 is in
Fuster, Tom. I. pp. 56-58.
Some other poets in the ancient Valencian have been mentioned, as
Juan Roiz de Corella, (Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 62,) a friend of the
unhappy Prince Carlos de Viana; two or three, by no means without
merit, who remain anonymous (Fuster, Tom. I. pp. 284-293); and
several who joined in a _certamen_ at Valencia, in 1498, in honor
of St. Christopher (Ibid., pp. 296, 297). But the attempt to
press into the service and to place in the thirteenth century the
manuscript in the Escurial containing the poems of Sta. María
Egypciaca and King Apollonius, already referred to (_ante_, p.
24) among the earliest Castilian poems, is necessarily a failure.
Ibid., p. 284.
Meantime, Valencian poets are not wanting who wrote more or less
in Castilian. Francisco Castelví, a friend of Fenollar, is one of
them.[559] Another is Narcis Viñoles, who flourished in 1500, who
wrote in Tuscan as well as in Castilian and Valencian, and who
evidently thought his native dialect somewhat barbarous.[560] A third
is Juan Tallante, whose religious poems are found at the opening of
the old General Cancionero.[561] A fourth is Luis Crespi, member of
the ancient family of Valdaura, and in 1506 head of the University
of Valencia.[562] And among the latest, if not the very last, was
Fernandez de Heredia, who died in 1549, of whom we have hardly any
thing in Valencian, but much in Castilian.[563] Indeed, that the
Castilian, in the early part of the century, had obtained a real
supremacy in whatever there was of poetry and elegant literature along
the shores of the Mediterranean cannot be doubted; for, before the
death of Heredia, Boscan had already deserted his native Catalonian,
and begun to form a school in Spanish literature that has never since
disappeared; and shortly afterwards, Timoneda and his followers showed,
by their successful representation of Castilian farces in the public
squares of Valencia, that the ancient dialect had ceased to be insisted
upon in its own capital. The language of the court of Castile had, for
such purposes, become the prevailing language of all the South.
[559] Cancionero General, 1573, f. 251, and elsewhere.
[560] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 61. Fuster, Tom. I. p. 54. Cancionero
General, 1573, ff. 241, 251, 316, 318. Cerdá’s notes to Polo’s
Diana, 1802, p. 304. Viñoles, in the Prólogo to the translation
of the Latin Chronicle noticed on p. 216, says, “He has ventured
to stretch out his rash hand and put it into the pure, elegant,
and gracious Castilian, which, without falsehood or flattery,
may, among the many barbarous and savage dialects of our own
Spain, be called Latin-sounding and most elegant.” Suma de Todas
las Crónicas, Valencia, 1510, folio, f. 2.
[561] The religious poems of Tallante begin, I believe, all the
Cancioneros Generales, from 1511 to 1573.
[562] Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 238, 248, 300, 301. Fuster,
Tom. I. p. 65; and Cerdá’s notes to Gil Polo’s Diana, p. 306.
[563] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 102. Fuster, Tom. I. p. 87. Diana de
Polo, ed. Cerdá, 326. Cancionero General, 1573, ff. 185, 222,
225, 228, 230, 305-307.
This, in fact, was the circumstance that determined the fate of all
that remained in Spain on the foundations of the Provençal refinement.
The crowns of Aragon and Castile had been united by the marriage of
Ferdinand and Isabella; the court had been removed from Saragossa,
though that city still claimed the dignity of being regarded as an
independent capital; and with the tide of empire, that of cultivation
gradually flowed down from the West and the North. Some of the poets of
the South have, it is true, in later times, ventured to write in their
native dialects. The most remarkable of them is Vicent Garcia, who was
a friend of Lope de Vega, and died in 1623.[564] But his poetry, in
all its various phases, is a mixture of several dialects, and shows,
notwithstanding its provincial air, the influence of the court of
Philip the Fourth, where its author for a time lived; while the poetry
printed later, or heard in our own days on the popular theatres of
Barcelona and Valencia, is in a dialect so grossly corrupted, that
it is no longer easy to acknowledge it as that of the descendants of
Muntaner and March.[565]
[564] His Works were first printed with the following title:
“La Armonía del Parnas mes numerosa en las Poesías varias del
Atlant del Cel Poétic, lo Dr. Vicent Garcia” (Barcelona, 1700,
4to, 201 pp.). There has been some question about the proper date
of this edition, and therefore I give it as it is in my copy.
(See Torres Amat, Memorias, pp. 271-274.) It consists chiefly of
lyrical poetry, sonnets, _décimas_, _redondillas_, ballads, etc.;
but at the end is a drama called “Santa Barbara,” in three short
_jornadas_, with forty or fifty personages, some allegorical and
some supernatural, and the whole as fantastic as any thing of
the age that produced it. Another edition of Garcia’s Works was
printed at Barcelona in 1840, and a notice of him occurs in the
Semanario Pintoresco, 1843, p. 84.
[565] The Valencian has always remained a sweet dialect.
Cervantes praises it for its “honeyed grace” more than once. See
the second act of the “Gran Sultana,” and the opening of the
twelfth chapter in the third book of “Persiles and Sigismunda.”
Mayans y Siscar loses no occasion of honoring it; but he was a
native of Valencia, and full of Valencian prejudices.
The literary history of the kingdom of Valencia--both that of
the period when its native dialect prevailed, and that of the
more recent period during which the Castilian has enjoyed the
supremacy--has been illustrated with remarkable diligence and
success. The first person who devoted himself to it was Josef
Rodriguez, a learned ecclesiastic, who was born in its capital
in 1630, and died there in 1703, just at the moment when his
“Biblioteca Valentina” was about to be issued from the press, and
when, in fact, all but a few pages of it had been printed. But
though it was so near to publication, a long time elapsed before
it finally appeared; for his friend, Ignacio Savalls, to whom
the duty of completing it was intrusted, and who at once busied
himself with his task, died, at last, in 1746, without having
quite accomplished it.
Meanwhile, however, copies of the imperfect work had got
abroad, and one of them came into the hands of Vicente Ximeno,
a Valencian, as well as Rodriguez, and, like him, interested in
the literary history of his native kingdom. At first, Ximeno
conceived the project of completing the work of his predecessor;
but soon determined rather to use its materials in preparing
on the same subject another and a larger one of his own, whose
notices should come down to his own time. This he soon completed,
and published it at Valencia, in 1747-49, in two volumes, folio,
with the title of “Escritores de Valencia,”--not, however, so
quickly that the Biblioteca of Rodriguez had not been fairly
launched into the world, in the same city, in 1747, a few months
before the first volume of Ximeno’s appeared.
The dictionary of Ximeno, who died in 1764, brings down the
literary history of Valencia to 1748, from which date to 1829
it is continued by the “Biblioteca Valenciana” of Justo Pastor
Fuster, (Valencia, 1827-30, 2 tom., folio,) a valuable work,
containing a great number of new articles for the earlier period
embraced by the labors of Rodriguez and Ximeno, and making
additions to many which they had left imperfect.
In the five volumes, folio, of which the whole series consists,
there are 2841 articles. How many of those in Ximeno relate to
authors noticed by Rodriguez, and how many of those in Fuster
relate to authors noticed by either or both of his predecessors,
I have not examined; but the number is, I think, smaller than
might be anticipated; while, on the other hand, the new articles
and the additions to the old ones are more considerable and
important. Perhaps, taking the whole together, no portion
of Europe equally large has had its intellectual history
more carefully investigated than the kingdom of Valencia;--a
circumstance the more remarkable, if we bear in mind that
Rodriguez, the first person who undertook the work, was, as
he says, the first who attempted such a labor in any modern
language, and that Fuster, the last of them, though evidently
a man of curious learning, was by occupation a bookbinder, and
was led to his investigations, in a considerable degree, by
his interest in the rare books that were, from time to time,
intrusted to his mechanical skill.
The degradation of the two more refined dialects in the southern and
eastern parts of Spain, which was begun in the time of the Catholic
sovereigns, may be considered as completed when the seat of the
national government was settled, first in Old and afterwards in New
Castile; since, by this circumstance, the prevalent authority of
the Castilian was finally recognized and insured. The change was
certainly neither unreasonable nor ill-timed. The language of the North
was already more ample, more vigorous, and more rich in idiomatic
constructions; indeed, in almost every respect, better fitted to become
national than that of the South. And yet we can hardly follow and
witness the results of such a revolution but with feelings of a natural
regret; for the slow decay and final disappearance of any language
bring with them melancholy thoughts, which are, in some sort, peculiar
to the occasion. We feel as if a portion of the world’s intelligence
were extinguished; as if we were ourselves cut off from a part of the
intellectual inheritance, to which we had in many respects an equal
right with those who destroyed it, and which they were bound to pass
down to us unimpaired as they themselves had received it. The same
feeling pursues us even when, as in the case of the Greek or Latin, the
people that spoke it had risen to the full height of their refinement,
and left behind them monuments by which all future times can measure
and share their glory. But our regret is deeper when the language
of a people is cut off in its youth, before its character is fully
developed; when its poetical attributes are just beginning to appear,
and when all is bright with promise and hope.[566]
[566] The Catalans have always felt this regret, and have never
reconciled themselves heartily to the use of the Castilian;
holding their own dialect to have been, in the time of Ferdinand
and Isabella, more abundant and harmonious than the prouder one
that has so far displaced it. Villanueva, Viage á las Iglesias,
Valencia, 1821, 8vo, Tom. VII. p. 202.
This was singularly the misfortune and the fate of the Provençal and
of the two principal dialects into which it was modified and moulded.
For the Provençal started forth in the darkest period Europe had seen
since Grecian civilization had first dawned on the world. It kindled,
at once, all the South of France with its brightness, and spread its
influence, not only into the neighbouring countries, but even to the
courts of the cold and unfriendly North. It flourished long, with a
tropical rapidity and luxuriance, and gave token, from the first, of a
light-hearted spirit, that promised, in the fulness of its strength,
to produce a poetry, different, no doubt, from that of antiquity, with
which it had no real connection, but yet a poetry as fresh as the
soil from which it sprang, and as genial as the climate by which it
was quickened. But the cruel and shameful war of the Albigenses drove
the Troubadours over the Pyrenees, and the revolutions of political
power and the prevalence of the spirit of the North crushed them on
the Spanish shores of the Mediterranean. We follow, therefore, with a
natural and inevitable regret, their long and wearisome retreat, marked
as it is everywhere with the wrecks and fragments of their peculiar
poetry and cultivation, from Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona
to Saragossa and Valencia, where, oppressed by the prouder and more
powerful Castilian, what remained of the language that gave the first
impulse to poetical feeling in modern times sinks into a neglected
dialect, and, without having attained the refinement that would
preserve its name and its glory to future times, becomes as much a dead
language as the Greek or the Latin.[567]
[567] One of the most valuable monuments of the old dialects
of Spain is a translation of the Bible into Catalan, made by
Bonifacio Ferrer, who died in 1477, and was the brother of St.
Vincent Ferrer. It was printed at Valencia, in 1478, (folio,)
but the Inquisition came so soon to suppress it, that it never
exercised much influence on the literature or language of the
country; nearly every copy of it having been destroyed. Extracts
from it and sufficient accounts of it may be found in Castro,
Bib. Española, (Tom. I. pp. 444-448,) and McCrie’s “Reformation
in Spain” (Edinburgh, 1829, 8vo, pp. 191 and 414). Sismondi,
at the end of his discussion of the Provençal literature, in
his “Littérature du Midi de l’Europe,” has some remarks on its
decay, which in their tone are not entirely unlike those in the
last pages of this chapter, and to which I would refer both to
illustrate and to justify my own.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE PROVENÇAL AND COURTLY SCHOOL IN CASTILIAN LITERATURE.--PARTLY
INFLUENCED BY THE LITERATURE OF ITALY.--CONNECTION OF SPAIN WITH ITALY,
RELIGIOUS, INTELLECTUAL, AND POLITICAL.--SIMILARITY OF LANGUAGE IN
THE TWO COUNTRIES.--TRANSLATIONS FROM THE ITALIAN.--REIGN OF JOHN THE
SECOND.--TROUBADOURS AND MINNESINGERS THROUGHOUT EUROPE.--COURT OF
CASTILE.--THE KING.--THE MARQUIS OF VILLENA.--HIS ART OF CARVING.--HIS
ART OF POETRY.--HIS LABORS OF HERCULES.
The Provençal literature, which appeared so early in Spain, and which,
during the greater part of the period when it prevailed there, was
in advance of the poetical culture of nearly all the rest of Europe,
could not fail to exercise an influence on the Castilian, springing
up and flourishing at its side. But, as we proceed, we must notice
the influence of another literature over the Spanish, less visible
and important at first than that of the Provençal, but destined
subsequently to become much wider and more lasting;--I mean, of course,
the Italian.
The origin of this influence is to be traced far back in the history
of the Spanish character and civilization. Long, indeed, before a
poetical spirit had been reawakened anywhere in the South of Europe,
the Spanish Christians, through the wearisome centuries of their
contest with the Moors, had been accustomed to look towards Italy as
to the seat of a power whose foundations were laid in faith and hopes
extending far beyond the mortal struggle in which they were engaged;
not because the Papal See, in its political capacity, had then obtained
any wide authority in Spain, but because, from the peculiar exigencies
and trials of their condition, the religion of the Romish Church had
nowhere found such implicit and faithful followers as the body of the
Spanish Christians.
In truth, from the time of the great Arab invasion down to the fall of
Granada, this devoted people had rarely come into political relations
with the rest of Europe. Engrossed and exhausted by their wars at
home, they had, on the one hand, hardly been at all the subjects of
foreign cupidity or ambition; and, on the other, they had been little
able, even when they most desired it, to connect themselves with the
stirring interests of the world beyond their mountains, or attract the
sympathy of those more favored countries which, with Italy at their
head, were coming up to constitute the civilized power of Christendom.
But the Spaniards always felt their warfare to be peculiarly that of
soldiers of the Cross; they always felt themselves, beyond every thing
else and above every thing else, to be Christian men contending against
misbelief. Their religious sympathies were, therefore, constantly
apparent, and often predominated over all others; so that, while they
were little connected with the Church of Rome by those political ties
that were bringing half Europe into bondage, they were more connected
with its religious spirit than any other people of modern times;
more even than the armies of the Crusaders whom that same Church had
summoned out of all Christendom, and to whom it had given whatever of
its own resources and character it was able to impart.
To these religious influences of Italy upon Spain were early added
those of a higher intellectual culture. Before the year 1300, Italy
possessed at least five universities; some of them famous throughout
Europe, and attracting students from its most distant countries. Spain,
at the same period, possessed not one, except that of Salamanca, which
was in a very unsettled state.[568] Even during the next century, those
established at Huesca and Valladolid produced comparatively little
effect. The whole Peninsula was still in too disturbed a state for
any proper encouragement of letters; and those persons, therefore,
who wished to be taught, resorted, some of them, to Paris, but more
to Italy. At Bologna, which was probably the oldest, and for a long
time the most distinguished, of the Italian universities, we know
Spaniards were received and honored, during the thirteenth century,
both as students and as professors.[569] At Padua, the next in rank,
a Spaniard, in 1260, was made the Rector, or presiding officer.[570]
And, no doubt, in all the great Italian places of education, which were
easily accessible, especially in those of Rome and Naples, Spaniards
early sought the culture that was either not then to be obtained in
their own country, or to be had only with difficulty or by accident.
[568] The University of Salamanca owes its first endowment to
Alfonso X., 1254; but in 1310 it had already fallen into great
decay, and did not become an efficient and frequented university
till some time afterwards. Hist. de la Universidad de Salamanca,
por Pedro Chacon. Seminario Erudito, Madrid, 1789, 4to, Tom.
XVIII. pp. 13, 21, etc.
[569] Tiraboschi, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, Roma, 1782,
4to, Tom. IV. Lib. I. c. 3; and Fuster, Biblioteca Valenciana,
Tom. I. pp. 2, 9.
[570] Tiraboschi, ut sup.
In the next century, the instruction of Spaniards in Italy was put
upon a more permanent foundation, by Cardinal Carillo de Albornoz; a
prelate, a statesman, and a soldier, who, as Archbishop of Toledo,
was head of the Spanish Church in the reign of Alfonso the Eleventh,
and who afterwards, as regent for the Pope, conquered and governed
a large part of the Roman States, which, in the time of Rienzi, had
fallen off from their allegiance. This distinguished personage, during
his residence in Italy, felt the necessity of better means for the
education of his countrymen, and founded, for their especial benefit,
at Bologna, in 1364, the College of Saint Clement,--a munificent
institution, which has subsisted down to our own age.[571] From the
middle of the fourteenth century, therefore, it cannot be doubted that
the most direct means existed for the transmission of culture from
Italy to Spain; one of the most striking proofs of which is to be
found in the case of Antonio de Lebrixa, commonly called Nebrissensis,
who was educated at this college in the century following its first
foundation, and who, on his return home, did more to advance the cause
of letters in Spain than any other scholar of his time.[572]
[571] Tiraboschi, Tom. IV. Lib. I. c. 3, sect. 8. Antonio, Bib.
Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. pp. 169, 170.
[572] Antonio, Bib. Nova, Tom. I. pp. 132-138.
Commercial and political relations still further promoted a free
communication of the manners and literature of Italy to Spain.
Barcelona, long the seat of a cultivated court,--a city whose liberal
institutions had given birth to the first bank of exchange, and
demanded the first commercial code of modern times,--had, from the
days of James the Conqueror, exercised a sensible influence round the
shores of the Mediterranean, and come into successful competition
with the enterprise of Pisa and Genoa, even in the ports of Italy.
The knowledge and refinement its ships brought back, joined to the
spirit of commercial adventure that sent them out, rendered Barcelona,
therefore, in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, one
of the most magnificent cities in Europe, and carried its influence
not only quite through the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, of which
it was in many respects the capital, but into the neighbouring kingdom
of Castile, with which that of Aragon was, during much of this period,
intimately connected.[573]
[573] Prescott’s Hist. of Ferdinand and Isabella, Introd.,
Section 2; to which add the account of the residence in
Barcelona of Carlos de Viana, in Quintana’s Life of that
unhappy prince, (Vidas de Españoles Célebres, Tom. I.,) and
the very curious notice of Barcelona in Leo Von Rözmital’s
Ritter-Hof-und-Pilger-Reise, 1465-67, Stuttgard, 1844, 8vo, p.
111.
The political relations between Spain and Sicily were, however, earlier
and more close than those between Spain and Italy, and tended to the
same results. Giovanni da Procida, after long preparing his beautiful
island to shake off the hated yoke of the French, hastened, in 1282,
as soon as the horrors of the Sicilian Vespers were fulfilled, to lay
the allegiance of Sicily at the feet of Peter the Third of Aragon, who,
in right of his wife, claimed Sicily to be a part of his inheritance,
as heir of Conradin, the last male descendant of the imperial family
of the Hohenstauffen.[574] The revolution thus begun by a fiery
patriotism was successful; but from that time Sicily was either a fief
of the Aragonese crown, or was possessed, as a separate kingdom, by
a branch of the Aragonese family, down to the period when, with the
other possessions of Ferdinand the Catholic, it became a part of the
consolidated monarchy of Spain.
[574] Zurita, Anales de Aragon, Zaragoza, 1604, folio, Lib. IV.
c. 13, etc.; Mariana, Historia, Lib. XIV. c. 6;--both important,
but especially the first, as giving the Spanish view of a case
which we are more in the habit of considering either in its
Italian or its French relations.
The connection with Naples, which was of the same sort, followed later,
but was no less intimate. Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon, a prince of rare
wisdom and much literary cultivation, acquired Naples by conquest
in 1441, after a long struggle;[575] but the crown he had thus won
was passed down separately in an indirect line through four of his
descendants, till 1503, when, by a shameful treaty with France, and by
the genius and arms of Gonzalvo of Córdova, it was again conquered and
made a direct dependence of the Spanish throne.[576] In this condition,
as fiefs of the crown of Spain, both Sicily and Naples continued
subject kingdoms until after the Bourbon accession; both affording,
from the very nature of their relations to the thrones of Castile
and Aragon, constant means and opportunities for the transmission of
Italian cultivation and Italian literature to Spain itself.
[575] Schmidt, Geschichte Aragoniens im Mittelalter, pp. 337-354.
Heeren, Geschichte des Studiums der Classischen Litteratur,
Göttingen, 1797, 8vo, Tom. II. pp. 109-111.
[576] Prescott’s Hist. of Ferdinand and Isabella, Vol. III.
But the language of Italy, from its affinity to the Spanish,
constituted a medium of communication perhaps more important and
effectual than any or all of the others. The Latin was the mother of
both; and the resemblance between them was such, that neither could
claim to have features entirely its own: _Facies non una, nec diversa
tamen; qualem decet esse sororum_. It cost little labor to the Spaniard
to make himself master of the Italian. Translations, therefore, were
less common from the few Italian authors that then existed, worth
translating, than they would otherwise have been; but enough are
found, and early enough, to show that Italian authors and Italian
literature were not neglected in Spain. Ayala, the chronicler, who died
in 1407, was, as we have already observed, acquainted with the works
of Boccaccio.[577] A little later, we are struck by the fact that
the “Divina Commedia” of Dante was twice translated in the same year,
1428; once by Febrer into the Catalan dialect, and once by Don Enrique
de Villena into the Castilian. Twenty years afterwards, the Marquis
of Santillana is complimented as a person capable of correcting or
surpassing that great poet, and speaks himself of Dante, of Petrarch,
and of Boccaccio as if he were familiar with them all.[578] But the
name of this great nobleman brings us at once to the times of John the
Second, when the influences of Italian literature and the attempt to
form an Italian school in Spain are not to be mistaken. To this period,
therefore, we now turn.
[577] See _ante_, p. 180.
[578] “Con vos que emendays las Obras de Dante,” says Gomez
Manrique, in a poem addressed to his uncle, the great Marquis,
and found in the “Cancionero General,” 1573, f. 76. b;--words
which, however we may interpret them, imply a familiar knowledge
of Dante, which the Marquis himself yet more directly announces
in his well-known letter to the Constable of Portugal. Sanchez,
Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. p. liv.
The long reign of John the Second, extending from 1407 to 1454, unhappy
as it was for himself and for his country, was not unfavorable to the
progress of some of the forms of elegant literature. During nearly the
whole of it, the weak king himself was subjected to the commanding
genius of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, whose control, though he
sometimes felt it to be oppressive, he always regretted, when any
accident in the troubles of the times threw it off, and left him to
bear alone the burden which belonged to his position in the state. It
seems, indeed, to have been a part of the Constable’s policy to give
up the king to his natural indolence, and encourage his effeminacy
by filling his time with amusements that would make business more
unwelcome to him than the hard tyranny of the minister who relieved him
from it.[579]
[579] Mariana, Historia, Madrid, 1780, fol., Tom. II. pp.
236-407. See also the very remarkable details given by Fernan
Perez de Guzman, in his “Generaciones y Semblanzas,” c. 33.
Among these amusements, none better suited the humor of the idle king
than letters. He was by no means without talent. He sometimes wrote
verses. He kept the poets of the time much about his person, and more
in his confidence and favor than was wise. He had, perhaps, even a
partial perception of the advantage of intellectual refinement to his
country, or at least to his court. One of his private secretaries,
to please his master and those nearest to the royal influence, made,
about the year 1449, an ample collection of the Spanish poetry then
most in favor, comprising the works of about fifty authors.[580] Juan
de Mena, the most distinguished poet of the time, was his official
chronicler, and the king sent him documents and directions, with great
minuteness and an amusing personal vanity, respecting the manner in
which the history of his reign should be written; while Juan de Mena,
on his part, like a true courtier, sent his verses to the king to be
corrected.[581] His physician, too, who seems to have been always in
attendance on his person, was the gay and good-humored Ferdinand Gomez,
who has left us, if we are to believe them genuine, a pleasing and
characteristic collection of letters; and who, after having served and
followed his royal master above forty years, sleeping, as he tells us,
at his feet and eating at his table, mourned his death, as that of one
whose kindness to him had been constant and generous.[582]
[580] Castro, Bib. Española, Tom. I. pp. 265-346.
[581] See the amusing letters in the “Centon Epistolario” of
Fern. Gomez de Cibdareal, Nos. 47, 49, 56, and 76;--a work,
however, whose authority will hereafter be called in question.
[582] Ibid., Epístola 105.
Surrounded by persons such as these, in continual intercourse with
others like them, and often given up to letters to avoid the
solicitation of state affairs and to gratify his constitutional
indolence, John the Second made his reign, though discreditable to
himself as a prince, and disastrous to Castile as an independent state,
still interesting by a sort of poetical court which he gathered about
him, and important as it gave an impulse to refinement perceptible
afterwards through several generations.
There has been a period like this in the history of nearly all the
modern European nations,--one in which a taste for poetical composition
was common at court, and among those higher classes of society within
whose limits intellectual cultivation was then much confined. In
Germany, such a period is found as early as the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries; the unhappy young Conradin, who perished in 1268 and is
commemorated by Dante, being one of the last of the princely company
that illustrates it. For Italy, it begins at about the same time, in
the Sicilian court; and though discountenanced both by the spirit of
the Church, and by the spirit of such commercial republics as Pisa,
Genoa, and Florence,--no one of which had then the chivalrous tone that
animated, and indeed gave birth, to this early refinement throughout
Europe,--it can still be traced down as far as the age of Petrarch.
Of the appearance of such a taste in the South of France, in Catalonia,
and in Aragon, with its spread to Castile under the patronage of
Alfonso the Wise, notice has already been taken. But now we find it
in the heart and in the North of the country, extending, too, into
Andalusia and Portugal, full of love and knighthood; and though not
without the conceits that distinguished it wherever it appeared, yet
sometimes showing touches of nature, and still oftener a graceful
ingenuity of art, that have not lost their interest down to our
own times. Under its influence was formed that school of poetry
which, marked by its most prominent attribute, has been sometimes
called the school of the _Minnesingers_, or the poets of love and
gallantry;[583] a school which either owed its existence everywhere to
the Troubadours of Provence, or took, as it advanced, much of their
character. In the latter part of the thirteenth century, its spirit
is already perceptible in the Castilian; and, from that time, we have
occasionally caught glimpses of it, down to the point at which we are
now arrived,--the first years of the reign of John the Second,--when
we find it beginning to be colored by an infusion of the Italian, and
spreading out into such importance as to require a separate examination.
[583] _Minne_ is the word for _love_ in the “Nibelungenlied”
and in the oldest German poetry generally, and is applied
occasionally to spiritual and religious affections, but almost
always to the love connected with gallantry. There has been
a great deal of discussion about its etymology and primitive
meanings in the Lexicons of Wachter, Ménage, Adelung, etc.; but
it is enough for our purpose to know that the word itself is
peculiarly appropriate to the fanciful and more or less conceited
school of poetry that everywhere appeared under the influences of
chivalry. It is the word that gave birth to the French _mignon_,
the English _minion_, etc.
And the first person in the group to whom our notice is attracted, as
its proper, central figure, is King John himself. Of him his chronicler
said, with much truth, though not quite without flattery, that “he
drew all men to him, was very free and gracious, very devout and very
bold, and gave himself much to the reading of philosophy and poetry.
He was skilled in matters of the Church, tolerably learned in Latin,
and a great respecter of such men as had knowledge. He had many natural
gifts. He was a lover of music; he played, sung, and made verses;
and he danced well.”[584] One who knew him better describes him more
skilfully. “He was,” says Fernan Perez de Guzman, “a man who talked
with judgment and discretion. He knew other men, and understood who
conversed well, wisely, and graciously; and he loved to listen to men
of sense, and noted what they said. He spoke and understood Latin.
He read well, and liked books and histories, and loved to hear witty
rhymes, and knew when they were not well made. He took great solace in
gay and shrewd conversation, and could bear his part in it. He loved
the chase, and hunting of fierce animals, and was well skilled in all
the arts of it. Music, too, he understood, and sung and played; was
good in jousting, and bore himself well in tilting with reeds.”[585]
[584] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1454, c. 2.
[585] Generaciones y Semblanzas, Cap. 33. Diego de Valera, who,
like Guzman, just cited, had much personal intercourse with the
king, gives a similar account of him, in a style no less natural
and striking. “He was,” says that chronicler, “devout and humane;
liberal and gentle; tolerably well taught in the Latin tongue;
bold, gracious, and of winning ways. He was tall of stature,
and his bearing was regal, with much natural ease. Moreover, he
was a good musician; sang, played, and danced; and wrote good
verses [_trobaua muy bien_]. Hunting pleased him much; he read
gladly books of philosophy and poetry, and was learned in matters
belonging to the Church.” Crónica de Hyspaña, Salamanca, 1495,
folio, f. 89.
How much poetry he wrote we do not know. His physician says, “The king
recreates himself with writing verses”;[586] and others repeat the
fact. But the chief proof of his skill that has come down to our times
is to be found in the following lines, in the Provençal manner, on the
falsehood of his lady.[587]
[586] Fernan Gomez de Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, Ep. 20.
[587] They are commonly printed with the Works of Juan de Mena,
as in the edition of Seville, 1534, folio, f. 104, but are often
found elsewhere.
Amor, yo nunca pensé,
Que tan poderoso eras,
Que podrias tener maneras
Para trastornar la fé,
Fasta agora que lo sé.
Pensaba que conocido
Te debiera yo tener,
Mas no pudiera creer
Que fueras tan mal sabido.
Ni jamas no lo pensé,
Aunque poderoso eras,
Que podrias tener maneras
Para trastornar la fé,
Fasta agora que lo sé.
O Love, I never, never thought
Thy power had been so great,
That thou couldst change my fate,
By changes in another wrought,
Till now, alas! I know it.
I thought I knew thee well,
For I had known thee long;
But though I felt thee strong,
I felt not all thy spell.
Nor ever, ever had I thought
Thy power had been so great,
That thou couldst change my fate,
By changes in another wrought,
Till now, alas! I know it.
Among those who most interested themselves in the progress of poetry
in Spain, and labored most directly to introduce it at the court of
Castile, the person first in rank after the king was his near kinsman,
Henry, Marquis of Villena, born in 1384, and descended in the paternal
line from the royal house of Aragon, and in the maternal from that
of Castile.[588] “In early youth,” says one who knew him well, “he
was inclined to the sciences and the arts, rather than to knightly
exercises, or even to affairs, whether of the state or the Church; for,
without any master, and none constraining him to learn, but rather
hindered by his grandfather, who would have had him for a knight, he
did, in childhood, when others are wont to be carried to their schools
by force, turn himself to learning against the good-will of all; and so
high and so subtile a wit had he, that he learned any science or art to
which he addicted himself, in such wise, that it seemed as if it were
done by force of nature.”[589]
[588] His family, at the time of his birth, possessed the only
marquisate in the kingdom. Salazar de Mendoza, Orígen de las
Dignidades Seglares de Castilla y Leon, Toledo, 1618, folio, Lib.
III. c. xii.
[589] Fernan Perez de Guzman, Gen. y Semblanzas, Cap. 28.
But his rank and position brought him into the affairs of the world
and the troubles of the times, however little he might be fitted to
play a part in them. He was made Master of the great military and
monastic Order of Calatrava, but, owing to irregularities in his
election, was ultimately ejected from his place, and left in a worse
condition than if he had never received it.[590] In the mean time,
he resided chiefly at the court of Castile; but from 1412 to 1414 he
was at that of his kinsman, Ferdinand the Just, of Aragon, in honor
of whose coronation at Saragossa he composed an allegorical drama,
which is unhappily lost. Afterwards, he accompanied that monarch to
Barcelona, where, as we have seen, he did much to restore and sustain
the poetical school called the Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia. When,
however, he lost his place as Master of the Order of Calatrava, he sunk
into obscurity. The Regency of Castile, willing to make him some amends
for his losses, gave him the poor lordship of Iniesta in the bishopric
of Cuenca; and there he spent the last twenty years of his life in
comparative poverty, earnestly devoted to such studies as were known
and fashionable in his time. He died while on a visit at Madrid, in
1434; the last of his great family.[591]
[590] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1407, Cap. 4, and 1434,
Cap. 8, where his character is pithily given in the following
words: “Este caballero fue muy grande letrado é supo muy poco
en lo que le cumplia.” In the “Comedias Escogidas” (Madrid,
4to, Tom. IX., 1657) is a poor play entitled “El Rey Enrique el
Enfermo, de seis Ingenios,” in which that unhappy king, contrary
to the truth of history, is represented as making the Marquis of
Villena Master of Calatrava, in order to dissolve his marriage
and obtain his wife. Who were the six wits that invented this
calumny does not appear.
[591] Zurita, Anales de Aragon, Lib. XIV. c. 22. The best
notice of the Marquis of Villena is in Juan Antonio Pellicer,
“Biblioteca de Traductores Españoles,” (Madrid, 1778, 8vo, Tom.
II. pp. 58-76,) to which, however, the accounts in Antonio (Bib.
Vetus, ed. Bayer, Lib. X. c. 3) and Mariana (Hist., Lib. XX.
c. 6) should be added. The character of a bold, unscrupulous,
ambitious man, given to Villena by Larra, in his novel entitled
“El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente,” published at Madrid,
about 1835, has no proper foundation in history.
Among his favorite studies, besides poetry, history, and elegant
literature, were philosophy and the mathematics, astrology, and
alchemy. But in an age of great ignorance and superstition, such
pursuits were not indulged in without rebuke. Don Enrique, therefore,
like others, was accounted a necromancer; and so deeply did this belief
strike its roots, that a popular tradition of his guilt has survived
in Spain nearly or quite down to our own age.[592] The effects, at the
time, were yet more unhappy and absurd. A large and rare collection
of books that he left behind him excited alarm, immediately after his
death. “Two cart-loads of them,” says one claimed to have been his
contemporary and friend, “were carried to the king, and because it was
said they related to magic and unlawful arts, the king sent them to
Friar Lope de Barrientos;[593] and Friar Lope, who cares more to be
about the Prince than to examine matters of necromancy, burnt above
a hundred volumes, of which he saw no more than the king of Morocco
did, and knew no more than the Dean of Ciudad Rodrigo; for many men
now-a-days make themselves the name of learned by calling others
ignorant; but it is worse yet when men make themselves holy by calling
others necromancers.”[594] Juan de Mena, to whom the letter containing
this statement was addressed, offered a not ungraceful tribute to the
memory of Villena in three of his three hundred _coplas_;[595] and the
Marquis of Santillana, distinguished for his love of letters, wrote a
separate poem on the occasion of his noble friend’s death, placing him,
after the fashion of his age and country, above all Greek, above all
Roman fame.[596]
[592] Pellicer speaks of the traditions of Villena’s necromancy
as if still current in his time (loc. cit. p. 65). How absurd
some of them were may be seen in a note of Pellicer to his
edition of Don Quixote, (Parte I. c. 49,) and in the Dissertation
of Feyjoó, “Teatro Crítico” (Madrid, 1751, 8vo, Tom. VI. Disc.
ii. sect. 9). Mariana evidently regarded the Marquis as a dealer
in the black arts, (Hist., Lib. XIX. c. 8,) or, at least, chose
to have it thought he did.
[593] Lope de Barrientos was confessor to John II., and perhaps
his knowledge of these very books led him to compose a treatise
against Divination, which has never been printed. (Antonio,
Bib. Vetus, Lib. X. c. 11,) but of which I have ample extracts,
through the kindness of D. Pascual de Gayangos, and in which
the author says that among the books burned was the one called
“Raziel,” from the name of one of the angels who guarded the
entrance to Paradise, and taught the art of divination to a
son of Adam, from whose traditions the book in question was
compiled. It may be worth while to add, that this Barrientos was
a Dominican, one of the order of monks to whom, thirty years
afterwards, Spain was chiefly indebted for the Inquisition, which
soon bettered his example by burning, not only books, but men.
He died in 1469, having filled, at different times, some of the
principal offices in the kingdom.
[594] Cibdareal, Centon Epistolario, Epist. lxvi.
[595] Coplas 126-128.
[596] It is found in the “Cancionero General,” 1573, (ff. 34-37,)
and is a Vision in imitation of Dante’s.
But though the unhappy Marquis of Villena may have been in advance of
his age, as far as his studies and knowledge were concerned, still the
few of his works now known to us are far from justifying the whole of
the reputation his contemporaries gave him. His “Arte Cisoria,” or Art
of Carving, is proof of this. It was written in 1423, at the request
of his friend, the chief carver of John the Second, and begins, in the
most formal and pedantic manner, with the creation of the world and the
invention of all the arts, among which the art of carving is made early
to assume a high place. Then follows an account of what is necessary
to make a good carver; after which we have, in detail, the whole
mystery of the art, as it ought to be practised at the royal table. It
is obvious from sundry passages of the work, that the Marquis himself
was by no means without a love for the good cheer he so carefully
explains,--a circumstance, perhaps, to which he owed the gout that we
are told severely tormented his latter years. But in its style and
composition this specimen of the didactic prose of the age has little
value, and can be really curious only to those who are interested in
the history of manners.[597]
[597] The “Arte Cisoria ó Tratado del Arte de cortar del
Cuchillo” was first printed under the auspices of the Library
of the Escurial, (Madrid, 1766, 4to,) from a manuscript in that
precious collection marked with the fire of 1671. It is not
likely soon to come to a second edition. If I were to compare
it with any contemporary work, it would be with the old English
“Treatyse on Fyshynge with an Angle,” sometimes attributed to
Dame Juliana Berners, but it lacks the few literary merits found
in that little work.
Similar remarks might probably be made about his treatise on the “Arte
de Trobar,” or the “Gaya Sciencia”; a sort of Art of Poetry, addressed
to the Marquis of Santillana, in order to carry into his native Castile
some of the poetical skill possessed by the Troubadours of the South.
But we have only an imperfect abstract of it, accompanied, indeed,
with portions of the original work, which are interesting as being the
oldest on its subject in the language.[598] More interesting, however,
than either would be his translations of the Rhetorica of Cicero, the
Divina Commedia of Dante, and the Æneid of Virgil. But of the first we
have lost all trace. Of the second we know only that it was in prose,
and addressed to his friend and kinsman the Marquis of Santillana. And
of the Æneid there remain but seven books, with a commentary to three
of them, from which a few extracts have been published.[599]
[598] All we have of this “Arte de Trobar” is in Mayans y Siscar,
“Orígenes de la Lengua Española” (Madrid, 1737, 12mo, Tom. II.
pp. 321-342). It seems to have been written in 1433.
[599] The best account of them is in Pellicer, Bib. de
Traductores, loc. cit. I am sorry to add, that the specimen
given of the translation from Virgil, though short, affords some
reason to doubt whether the Marquis was a good Latin scholar. It
is in prose, and the Preface sets forth that it was written at
the earnest request of John, King of Navarre, whose curiosity
about Virgil had been excited by the reverential notices of him
in Dante’s “Divina Commedia.” See, also, Memorias de la Academia
de Historia, Tom. VI. p. 455, note. In the King’s Library at
Paris is a prose translation of the _last_ nine books of Virgil’s
Æneid, made, in 1430, by a Juan de Villena, who qualifies himself
as a “_servant_ of Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza.” (Ochoa, Catálogo de
Manuscritos, Paris, 1844, 4to, p. 375.) It would be curious to
ascertain whether the two have any connection, as both seem to be
connected with the Marquis of Santillana.
Villena’s reputation, therefore, must rest chiefly on his “Trabajos
de Hercules,” or The Labors of Hercules, written to please one of
his Catalonian friends, Pero Pardo, who asked to have an explanation
of the virtues and achievements of Hercules; always a great national
hero in Spain. The work seems to have been much admired and read in
manuscript, and, after printing was introduced into Spain, it went
through two editions before the year 1500; but all knowledge of it was
so completely lost soon afterwards, that the most intelligent authors
of Spanish literary history down to our own times have generally spoken
of it as a poem. It is, however, in fact, a short prose treatise,
filling, in the first edition--that of 1483--thirty large leaves. It
is divided into twelve chapters, each devoted to one of the twelve
great labors of Hercules, and each subdivided into four parts: the
first part containing the common mythological story of the labor
under consideration; the second, an explanation of this story as if
it were an allegory; the third, the historical facts upon which it is
conjectured to have been founded; and the fourth, a moral application
of the whole to some one of twelve conditions, into which the author
very arbitrarily divides the human race, beginning with princes and
ending with women.
Thus, in the fourth chapter, after telling the commonly received tale,
or, as he calls it, “the naked story,” of the Garden of the Hesperides,
he gives us an allegory of it, showing that Libya, where the fair
garden is placed, is human nature, dry and sandy; that Atlas, its lord,
is the wise man, who knows how to cultivate his poor desert; that the
garden is the garden of knowledge, divided according to the sciences;
that the tree in the midst is philosophy; that the dragon watching the
tree is the difficulty of study; and that the three Hesperides are
Intelligence, Memory, and Eloquence. All this and more he explains
under the third head, by giving the facts which he would have us
suppose constituted the foundation of the first two; telling us that
King Atlas was a wise king of the olden time, who first arranged and
divided all the sciences; and that Hercules went to him and acquired
them, after which he returned and imparted his acquisitions to King
Eurystheus. And, finally, in the fourth part of the chapter, he applies
it all to the Christian priesthood and the duty of this priesthood to
become learned and explain the Scriptures to the ignorant laity; as
if there were any possible analogy between them and Hercules and his
fables.[600]
[600] The “Trabajos de Hercules” is one of the rarest books in
the world, though there are editions of it of 1483 and 1499,
and perhaps one of 1502. The copy which I use is of the first
edition, and belongs to Don Pascual de Gayangos. It was printed
at Çamora, by Centenera, having been completed, as the colophon
tells us, on the 15th of January, 1483. It fills thirty leaves
in folio, double columns, and is illustrated by eleven curious
woodcuts, well done for the period and country. The mistakes made
about it are remarkable, and render the details I have given of
some consequence. Antonio, (Bib. Vetus, ed. Bayer, Tom. II. p.
222,) Velasquez, (Orígenes de la Poesía Castellana, 4to, Málaga,
1754, p. 49,) L. F. Moratin, (Obras, ed. de la Academia, Madrid,
1830, 8vo, Tom. I. Parte I. p. 114,) and even Torres Amat, in his
“Memorias,” (Barcelona, 1836, 8vo, p. 669,) all speak of it _as a
poem_. Of the edition printed at Burgos, in 1499, and mentioned
in Mendez, Typog. Esp., (p. 289,) I have never seen a copy, and,
except the above-mentioned copy of the first edition and an
imperfect one in the Royal Library at Paris, I know of none of
any edition;--so rare is it become.
The book, however, is worth the trouble of reading. It is, no doubt,
full of the faults peculiar to its age, and abounds in awkward
citations from Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and other Latin authors, then so
rarely found and so little known in Spain, that they added materially
to the interest and value of the treatise.[601] But the allegory
is sometimes amusing; the language is almost always good, and
occasionally striking by fine archaisms; and the whole has a dignity
about it which is not without its appropriate power and grace.[602]
[601] See Heeren, Geschichte der Class. Litteratur im
Mittelalter, Göttingen, 8vo, Tom. II., 1801, pp. 126-131. From
the Advertencia to the Marquis of Villena’s translation of
Virgil, it would seem that even Virgil was hardly known in Spain
in the beginning of the fifteenth century.
[602] Another work of the Marquis of Villena is mentioned in
Sempere y Guarinos, “Historia del Luxo de España,” (Madrid, 1788,
8vo, Tom. I. pp. 176-179,) called “El Triunfo de las Donas,”
and is said to have been found by him in a manuscript of the
fifteenth century, “with other works of the same wise author.”
The extract given by Sempere is on the fops of the time, and is
written with spirit.
From the Marquis of Villena himself, it is natural for us to turn to
one of his followers, known only as “Macias el Enamorado,” or Macias
the Lover; a name which constantly recurs in Spanish literature with a
peculiar meaning, given by the tragical history of the poet who bore
it. He was a Galician gentleman, who served the Marquis of Villena
as one of his esquires, and became enamoured of a maiden attached to
the same princely household with himself. But the lady, though he won
her love, was married, under the authority that controlled both of
them, to a knight of Porcuna. Still Macias in no degree restrained his
passion, but continued to express it to her in his verses, as he had
done before. The husband was naturally offended, and complained to the
Marquis, who, after in vain rebuking his follower, used his full power
as Grand Master of the Order of Calatrava, and cast Macias into prison.
But there he only devoted himself more passionately to the thoughts
of his lady, and, by his persevering love, still more provoked her
husband, who, secretly following him to his prison at Arjonilla, and
watching him one day as he chanced to be singing of his love and his
sufferings, was so stung by jealousy, that he cast a dart through the
gratings of the window, and killed the unfortunate poet with the name
of his lady still trembling on his lips.
The sensation produced by the death of Macias was such as belongs only
to an imaginative age, and to the sympathy felt for one who perished
because he was both a Troubadour and a lover. All men who desired to
be thought cultivated mourned his fate. His few poems in his native
Galician--only one of which, and that of moderate merit, is preserved
entire--became generally known, and were generally admired. His master,
the Marquis of Villena, Rodriguez del Padron, who was his countryman,
Juan de Mena, the great court poet, and the still greater Marquis of
Santillana, all bore testimony, at the time or immediately afterwards,
to the general sorrow. Others followed their example; and the custom of
referring constantly to him and to his melancholy fate was continued
in ballads and popular songs, until, in the poetry of Lope de Vega,
Calderon, and Quevedo, the name of Macias passed into a proverb, and
became synonymous with the highest and tenderest love.[603]
[603] The best account of Macias and of his verses is in
Bellermann’s “Alte Liederbücher der Portuguiesen” (Berlin, 1840,
4to, pp. 24-26); to which may well be added, Argote de Molina,
“Nobleza del Andaluzia,” (Sevilla, 1588, folio, Lib. II. c. 148,
f. 272,) Castro, “Biblioteca Española,” (Tom. I. p. 312,) and
Cortina’s notes to Bouterwek (p. 195). But the proofs of his
early and wide-spread fame are to be sought in Sanchez, “Poesías
Anteriores” (Tom. I. p. 138); in the “Cancionero General,” 1535
(ff. 67, 91); in Juan de Mena, Copla 105, with the notes on it
in the edition of Mena’s Works, 1566; in “Celestina,” Act II.;
in several plays of Calderon, such as “Para vencer Amor querer
vencerlo,” and “Qual es mayor Perfeccion”; in Góngora’s ballads;
and in many passages of Lope de Vega and Cervantes. There are
notices of Macias also in Ochoa, “Manuscritos Españoles,” Paris,
1844, 4to, p. 505. In Vol. XLVIII. of “Comedias Escogidas,”
(1704, 4to,) is an anonymous play on his adventures and death,
entitled “El Español mas Amante,” in which the unhappy Macias is
killed at the moment the Marquis of Villena arrives to release
him from prison;--and in our own times, Larra has made him the
hero of his “Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente,” already referred
to, and of a tragedy that bears his name, “Macias,” neither of
them true to the facts of history.
CHAPTER XIX.
MARQUIS OF SANTILLANA.--HIS LIFE.--HIS TENDENCY TO IMITATE THE
ITALIAN AND THE PROVENÇAL.--HIS COURTLY STYLE.--HIS WORKS.--HIS
CHARACTER.--JUAN DE MENA.--HIS LIFE.--HIS SHORTER POEMS.--HIS
LABYRINTH, AND ITS MERITS.
Next after the king and Villena in rank, and much before them in merit,
stands, at the head of the courtiers and poets of the reign of John
the Second, Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana; one of the
most distinguished members of that great family which has sometimes
claimed the Cid for its founder,[604] and which certainly, with a long
succession of honors, reaches down to our own times.[605] He was born
in 1398, but was left an orphan in early youth; so that, though his
father, the Grand Admiral of Castile, had, at the time of his death,
larger possessions than any other nobleman in the kingdom, the son,
when he was old enough to know their value, found them chiefly wrested
from him by the bold barons who in the most lawless manner then divided
among themselves the power and resources of the crown.
[604] Perez de Guzman, Generaciones y Semblanzas, Cap. 9.
[605] This great family is early connected with the poetry
of Spain. The grandfather of Iñigo sacrificed his own life
voluntarily to save the life of John I. at the battle of
Aljubarrota in 1385, and became in consequence the subject of
that stirring and glorious ballad,--
Si el cavallo vos han muerto,
Subid, Rey, en mi cavallo.
It is found at the end of the Eighth Part of the Romancero, 1597,
and is translated with much spirit by Lockhart, who, however,
evidently did not seek exactness in his version.
But the young Mendoza was not of a temper to submit patiently to such
wrongs. At the age of sixteen he already figures in the chronicles of
the time, as one of the dignitaries of state who honored the coronation
of Ferdinand of Aragon;[606] and at the age of eighteen, we are told,
he boldly reclaimed his possessions, which, partly through the forms of
law and partly by force of arms, he recovered.[607] From this period
we find him, during the reign of John the Second, busy in the affairs
of the kingdom, both civil and military; always a personage of great
consideration, and apparently one who, in difficult circumstances and
wild times, acted from manly motives. When only thirty years old, he
was distinguished at court as one of the persons concerned in arranging
the marriage of the Infanta of Aragon;[608] and, soon afterwards, had
a separate command against the Navarrese, in which, though he suffered
a defeat from greatly superior numbers, he acquired lasting honor by
his personal bravery and firmness.[609] Against the Moors he commanded
long, and was often successful; and after the battle of Olmedo, in
1445, he was raised to the very high rank of Marquis; none in Castile
having preceded him in that title except the family of Villena, already
extinct.[610]
[606] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1414, Cap. 2.
[607] It is Perez de Guzman, uncle of the Marquis, who declares
(Generaciones y Semblanzas, Cap. 9) that the father of the
Marquis had larger estates than any other Castilian knight;
to which may be added what Oviedo says so characteristically
of the young nobleman, that, “as he grew up, he recovered his
estates partly by law and partly by force of arms, and _so began
forthwith to be accounted much of a man_.” Batalla I. Quinquagena
i. Diálogo 8, MS.
[608] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1428, Cap. 7.
[609] Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. pp. v., etc.
[610] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1438, Cap. 2; 1445, Cap.
17; and Salazar de Mendoza, Dignidades de Castilla, Lib. III. c.
14.
He was early, but not violently, opposed to the great favorite, the
Constable Alvaro de Luna. In 1432, some of his friends and kinsmen,
the good Count Haro and the Bishop of Palencia, with their adherents,
having been seized by order of the Constable, Mendoza shut himself up
in his strongholds till he was fully assured of his own safety.[611]
From this time, therefore, the relations between two such personages
could not be considered friendly; but still appearances were kept up,
and the next year, at a grand jousting before the king in Madrid,
where Mendoza offered himself against all comers, the Constable was
one of his opponents; and after the encounter, they feasted together
merrily and in all honor.[612] Indeed, the troubles between them were
inconsiderable till 1448 and 1449, when the hard proceedings of the
Constable against others of the friends and relations of Mendoza led
him into a more formal opposition,[613] which in 1452 brought on a
regular conspiracy between himself and two more of the leading nobles
of the kingdom. The next year the favorite was sacrificed.[614] In the
last scenes, however, of this extraordinary tragedy, the Marquis of
Santillana seems to have had little share.
[611] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1432, Capp. 4 and 5.
[612] Ibid., Año 1433, Cap. 2.
[613] Ibid., Año 1449, Cap. 11.
[614] Ibid., Año 1452, Capp. 1, etc.
The king, disheartened by the loss of the minister on whose commanding
genius he had so long relied, died in 1454. But Henry the Fourth, who
followed on the throne of Castile, seemed even more willing to favor
the great family of the Mendozas than his father had been. The Marquis,
however, was little disposed to take advantage of his position. His
wife died in 1455, and the pilgrimage he made on that occasion to the
shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the religious poetry he wrote
the same year, show the direction his thoughts had now taken. In
this state of mind he seems to have continued; and though he once
afterwards joined effectively with others to urge upon the king’s
notice the disordered and ruinous state of the kingdom, yet, from the
fall of the Constable to the time of his own death, which happened in
1458, the Marquis was chiefly busied with letters, and with such other
occupations and thoughts as were consistent with a retired life.[615]
[615] The principal facts in the life of the Marquis of
Santillana are to be gathered--as, from his rank and
consideration in the state, might be expected--out of the
Chronicle of John II., in which he constantly appears after the
year 1414; but a very lively and successful sketch of him is to
be found in the fourth chapter of Pulgar’s “Claros Varones,” and
an elaborate, but ill-digested, biography in the first volume of
Sanchez, “Poesías Anteriores.”
It is remarkable, that one, who, from his birth and position, was so
much involved in the affairs of state at a period of great confusion
and violence, should yet have cultivated elegant literature with
earnestness. But the Marquis of Santillana, as he wrote to a friend
and repeated to Prince Henry, believed that knowledge neither blunts
the point of the lance, nor weakens the arm that wields a knightly
sword.[616] He therefore gave himself freely to poetry and other
graceful accomplishments; encouraged, perhaps, by the thought, that
he was thus on the road to please the wayward monarch he served, if
not the stern favorite who governed them all. One who was bred at the
court, of which the Marquis was so distinguished an ornament, says,
“He had great store of books, and gave himself to study, especially
the study of moral philosophy and of things foreign and old. And he
had always in his house doctors and masters, with whom he discoursed
concerning the knowledge and the books he studied. Likewise, he himself
made other books in verse and in prose, profitable to provoke to
virtue and to restrain from vice. And in such wise did he pass the
greater part of his leisure. Much fame and renown, also, he had in
many kingdoms out of Spain; but he thought it a greater matter to have
esteem among the wise than name and fame with the many.”[617]
[616] In the “Introduction del Marques á los Proverbios,” Anvers,
1552, 18mo, f. 150.
[617] Pulgar, Claros Varones, ut supra.
The works of the Marquis of Santillana show, with sufficient
distinctness, the relations in which he stood to his times and the
direction he was disposed to take. From his social position, he could
easily gratify any reasonable literary curiosity or taste he might
possess; for the resources of the kingdom were open to him, and he
could, therefore, not only obtain for his private study the poetry
then abroad in the world, but often command to his presence the poets
themselves. He was born in the Asturias, where his great family
fiefs lay, and was educated in Castile; so that, on this side, he
belonged to the genuinely indigenous school of Spanish poetry. But
then he was also intimate with the Marquis of Villena, the head of
the poetical Consistory of Barcelona, who, to encourage his poetical
studies, addressed to him, in 1433, his curious letter on the art
of the Troubadours, which Villena thus proposed to introduce into
Castile.[618] And, after all, he lived chiefly at the court of John the
Second, and was the friend and patron of the poets there, through whom
and through his love of foreign letters it was natural he should come
in contact with the great Italian masters, now exercising a wide sway
within their own peninsula. We must not be surprised, therefore, to
find that his own works belong more or less to each of these schools,
and define his position as that of one who stands connected with the
Provençal literature in Spain, which we have just examined; with the
Italian, whose influences were now beginning to appear; and with the
genuinely Spanish, which, though it often bears traces of each of the
others, prevails at last over both of them.
[618] See the preceding notice of Villena.
Of his familiarity with the Provençal poetry abundant proof may be
found in the Preface to his Proverbs, which he wrote when young, and
in his letter to the Constable of Portugal, which belongs to the
latter period of his life. In both, he treats the rules of that poetry
as well founded, explaining them much as his friend and kinsman, the
Marquis of Villena, did; and of some of the principal of its votaries
in Spain, such as Bergédan, and Pedro and Ausias March, he speaks with
great respect.[619] To Jordi, his contemporary, he elsewhere devotes
an allegorical poem of some length and merit, intended to do him the
highest honor as a Troubadour.[620]
[619] In the Introduction to his Proverbs, he boasts of his
familiarity with the Provençal rules of versifying.
[620] It is in the oldest Cancionero General, and copied from
that into Faber’s “Floresta,” No. 87.
But besides this, he directly imitated the Provençal poets. By far the
most beautiful of his works, and one which may well be compared with
the most graceful of the smaller poems in the Spanish language, is
entirely in the Provençal manner. It is called “Una Serranilla,” or A
Little Mountain Song, and was composed on a little girl, whom, when
following his military duty, he found tending her father’s herds on the
hills. Many such short songs occur in the later Provençal poets, under
the name of “Pastoretas,” and “Vaqueiras,” one of which, by Giraud
Riquier,--the same person who wrote verses on the death of Alfonso the
Wise,--might have served as the very prototype of the present one; so
strong is the resemblance between them. But none of them, either in the
Provençal or in the Spanish, has ever equalled this “Serranilla” of the
soldier; which, besides its inherent simplicity and liquid sweetness,
has such grace and lightness in its movement, that it bears no marks of
an unbecoming imitation, but, on the contrary, is rather to be regarded
as a model of the natural old Castilian song, never to be transferred
to another language, and hardly to be imitated with success in its
own.[621]
[621] The _Serranas_ of the Arcipreste de Hita were noticed
when speaking of his works; but the six by the Marquis of
Santillana approach nearer to the Provençal model, and have a
higher poetical merit. For their form and Structure, see Diez,
Troubadours, p. 114. The one specially referred to in the text
is so beautiful, that I add a part of it, with the corresponding
portion of the one by Riquier.
Moza tan fermosa
Non vi en la frontera,
Como una vaquera
De la Finojosa.
· · · · ·
En un verde prado
De rosas e flores,
Guardando ganado
Con otros pastores,
La vi tan fermosa,
Que apenas creyera,
Que fuese vaquera
De la Finojosa.
Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. p. xliv.
The following is the opening of that by Riquier:--
Gaya pastorelha
Trobey l’ autre dia
En una ribeira,
Que per caut la belha
Sos anhels tenia
Desotz un ombreira;
Un capelh fazia
De flors e sezia,
Sus en la fresqueria, etc.
Raynouard, Troubadours, Tom. III. p. 470.
None of the Provençal poets, I think, wrote so beautiful
_Pastoretas_ as Riquier; so that the Marquis chose a good model.
The traces of Italian culture in the poetry of the Marquis of
Santillana are no less obvious and important. Besides praising
Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,[622] he imitates the opening of the
“Inferno” in a long poem, in octave stanzas, on the death of the
Marquis of Villena;[623] while, in the “Coronation of Jordi,” he
shows that he was sensible to the power of more than one passage in
the “Purgatorio.”[624] Moreover, he has the merit--if it be one--of
introducing the peculiarly Italian form of the Sonnet into Spain; and
with the different specimens of it that still remain among his works
begins the ample series which, since the time of Boscan, has won for
itself so large a space in Spanish literature. Seventeen sonnets of the
Marquis of Santillana have been published, which he himself declares
to be written in “the Italian fashion,” and appeals to Cavalcante,
Guido d’Ascoli, Dante, and especially Petrarch, as his predecessors and
models; an appeal hardly necessary to one who has read them, so plain
is his desire to imitate the greatest of his masters. The sonnets of
the Marquis of Santillana, however, have little merit, except in their
careful versification, and were soon forgotten.[625]
[622] See the Letter to the Constable of Portugal.
[623] Cancionero General, 1573, f. 34. It was, of course, written
after 1434, that being the year Villena died.
[624] Faber, Floresta, ut sup.
[625] Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. pp. xx., xxi., xl.
Quintana, Poesías Castellanas, Madrid, 1807, 12mo, Tom. I. p. 13.
There are imperfect discussions about the introduction of sonnets
into Spanish poetry in Argote de Molina’s “Discurso,” at the end
of the “Conde Lucanor,” (1575, f. 97,) and in Herrera’s edition
of Garcilasso (Sevilla, 1580, 8vo, p. 75). But all doubts are put
at rest, and all questions answered, in the edition of the “Rimas
Ineditas de Don Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza,” published at Paris,
by Ochoa (1844, 8vo); where, in a letter by the Marquis, dated
May 4, 1444, and addressed, with his Poems, to Doña Violante
de Pradas, he tells her expressly that he imitated the Italian
masters in the composition of his poems.
But his principal works were more in the manner then prevalent at the
Spanish court. Most of them are in verse, and, like a short poem to the
queen, several riddles, and a few religious compositions, are generally
full of conceits and affectation, and have little value of any
sort.[626] Two or three, however, are of consequence. One called “The
Complaint of Love,” and referring apparently to the story of Macias, is
written with fluency and sweetness, and is curious as containing lines
in Galician, which, with other similar verses and his letter to the
Constable of Portugal, show he extended his thoughts to this ancient
dialect, where are found some of the earliest intimations of Spanish
literature.[627] Another of his poems, which has been called “The
Ages of the World,” is a compendium of universal history, beginning
at the creation and coming down to the time of John the Second, with
a gross compliment to whom it ends. It was written in 1426, and fills
three hundred and thirty-two stanzas of double _redondillas_, dull and
prosaic throughout.[628] The third is a moral poem, thrown into the
shape of a dialogue between Bias and Fortune, setting forth the Stoical
doctrine of the worthlessness of all outward good. It consists of a
hundred and eighty octave stanzas in the short Spanish measure, and was
written for the consolation of a cousin and much loved friend of the
Toledo family, whose imprisonment in 1448, by order of the Constable,
caused great troubles in the kingdom, and contributed to the final
alienation of the Marquis from the favorite.[629] The fourth is on the
kindred subject of the fall and death of the Constable himself, in
1453; a poem in fifty-three octave stanzas, each of two _redondillas_,
containing a confession supposed to have been made by the victim on the
scaffold, partly to the multitude and partly to his priest.[630] In
both of the last two poems, and especially in the dialogue between Bias
and Fortune, passages of merit are found, which are not only fluent,
but strong; not only terse and pointed, but graceful.[631]
[626] They are found in the Cancionero General of 1573, ff. 24,
27, 37, 40, and 234.
[627] Sanchez, Poesías Anteriores, Tom. I. pp. 143-147.
[628] It received its name from Ochoa, who first printed it in
his edition of the Marquis’s Poems (pp. 97-240); but Amador de
los Rios, in his “Estudios sobre los Judios de España,” (Madrid,
1848, 8vo, p. 342,) gives reasons which induce him to believe
it to be the work of Pablo de Sta. María, who will be noticed
hereafter.
[629] Faber, Floresta, No. 743. Sanchez, Tom. I. p. xli. Claros
Varones de Pulgar, ed. 1775, p. 224. Crónica de D. Juan IIº, Año
1448, Cap. 4.
[630] Cancionero General, 1573, f. 37.
[631] Two or three other poems are given by Ochoa: the “Pregunta
de Nobles,” a sort of moral lament of the poet, that he cannot
see and know the great men of all times; the “Doze Trabajos de
Ercoles,” which has sometimes been confounded with the prose
work of Villena bearing the same title; and the “Infierno de
Enamoradas,” which was afterwards imitated by Garci Sanchez de
Badajoz. All three are short and of little value.
But the most important of the poetical works of the Marquis of
Santillana is one approaching the form of a drama, and called the
“Comedieta de Ponza,” or The Little Comedy of Ponza. It is founded on
the story of a great sea-fight near the island of Ponza in 1435, where
the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the Infante Don Henry of Castile,
with many noblemen and knights, were taken prisoners by the Genoese,--a
disaster to Spain, which fills a large space in the old national
chronicles.[632] The poem of Santillana, written immediately after the
occurrence of the calamity it commemorates, is called a Comedy, because
its conclusion is happy, and Dante is cited as authority for this use
of the word.[633] But in fact it is a dream or vision; and one of the
early passages in the “Inferno,” imitated at the very opening, leaves
no doubt as to what was in the author’s mind when he wrote it.[634]
The queens of Navarre and Aragon, and the Infante Doña Catalina, as
the persons most interested in the unhappy battle, are the chief
speakers. But Boccaccio is also a principal personage, though seemingly
for no better reason than that he wrote the treatise on the Disasters
of Princes; and after being addressed very solemnly in this capacity
by the three royal ladies and by the Marquis of Santillana himself,
he answers no less solemnly in his native Italian. Queen Leonora
then gives him an account of the glories and grandeur of her house,
accompanied with auguries of misfortune, which are hardly uttered
before a letter comes announcing their fulfilment in the calamities
of the battle of Ponza. The queen mother, after hearing the contents
of this letter quite through, falls as one dead. Fortune, in a female
form, richly attired, enters, and consoles them all; first showing a
magnificent perspective of past times, with promises of still greater
glory to their descendants, and then fairly presenting to them in
person the very princes whose captivity had just filled them with such
fear and grief. And this ends the Comedieta.
[632] For example, Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1435, Cap. 9.
[633] In the letter to Doña Violante de Pradas, he says he began
it immediately after the battle.
[634] Speaking of the dialogue he heard about the battle, the
Marquis says, using almost the very words of Dante,--
Tan pauroso,
Que solo en pensarlo me vence piedad.
It fills a hundred and twenty of the old Italian octave stanzas,--such
stanzas as are used in the “Filostrato” of Boccaccio,--and much of it
is written in easy verse. There is a great deal of ancient learning
introduced into it awkwardly and in bad taste; but there is one passage
in which a description of Fortune is skilfully borrowed from the
seventh canto of the “Inferno,” and another in which is a pleasing
paraphrase of the _Beatus ille_ of Horace.[635] The machinery and
management of the story, it is obvious, could hardly be worse; and yet
when it was written, and perhaps still more when it was declaimed,
as it probably was before some of the sufferers in the disaster it
records, it may well have been felt as an effective exhibition of a
very grave passage in the history of the time. On this account, too, it
is still interesting.
[635] As a specimen of the best parts of the Comedieta, I copy
the paraphrase from a manuscript, better, I think, than that used
by Ochoa:--
ST. XVI.
Benditos aquellos, que, con el açada,
Sustentan sus vidas y biven contentos,
Y de quando en quando conoscen morada,
Y sufren placientes las lluvias y vientos.
Ca estos no temen los sus movimientos,
Nin saben las cosas del tiempo pasado,
Nin de las presentes se hacen cuidado,
Nin las venideras do an nascimientos.
ST. XVII.
Benditos aquellos que siguen las fieras
Con las gruesas redes y canes ardidos,
Y saben las troxas y las delanteras,
Y fieren de arcos en tiempos devidos.
Ca estos por saña no son comovidos,
Nin vana cobdicia los tiene subjetos,
Nin quieren tesoros, ni sienten defetos,
Nin turba fortuna sus libres sentidos.
The Comedieta, however, was not the most popular, if it was the most
important, of the works of Santillana. That distinction belongs to
a collection of Proverbs, which he made at the request of John the
Second, for the education of his son Henry, afterwards Henry the
Fourth. It consists of a hundred rhymed sentences, each generally
containing one proverb, and so sometimes passes under the name of the
“Centiloquio.” The proverbs themselves are, no doubt, mostly taken from
that unwritten wisdom of the common people, for which, in this form,
Spain has always been more famous than any other country; but, in the
general tone he has adopted, and in many of his separate instructions,
the Marquis is rather indebted to King Solomon and the New Testament.
Such as they are, however, they had--perhaps from their connection with
the service of the heir-apparent--a remarkable success, to which many
old manuscripts, still extant, bear witness. They were printed, too,
as early as 1496; and in the course of the next century nine or ten
editions of them may be reckoned, generally encumbered with a learned
commentary by Doctor Pedro Diaz of Toledo. They have, however, no
poetical value, and interest us only from the circumstances attending
their composition, and from the fact that they form the oldest
collection of proverbs made in modern times.[636]
[636] There is another collection of proverbs made by the
Marquis of Santillana, that is to be found in Mayans y Siscar,
“Orígenes de la Lengua Castellana” (Tom. II. pp. 179, etc.). They
are, however, neither rhymed nor glossed; but simply arranged
in alphabetical order, as they were gathered from the lips of
the common people, or, as the collector says, “from the old
women in their chimney-corners.” For an account of the printed
editions of the _rhymed_ proverbs prepared for Prince Henry, see
Mendez, Typog. Esp., p. 196, and Sanchez, Tom. I. p. xxxiv. The
seventeenth proverb, or that on Prudence, may be taken as a fair
specimen of the whole, all being in the same measure and manner.
It is as follows:--
Si fueres gran eloquente
Bien será,
Pero mas te converrá
Ser prudente.
Que _el prudente es obediente_
Todavia
A moral filosofía
Y sirviente.
A few of the hundred proverbs have a prose commentary by the
Marquis himself; but neither have these the good fortune to
escape the learned discussions of the Toledan Doctor. The whole
collection is spoken of slightingly by the wise author of the
“Diálogo de las Lenguas.” Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. p.
13.
The same Pero Diaz, who burdened the Proverbs of the Marquis of
Santillana with a commentary, prepared, at the request of John
II., a collection of proverbs from Seneca, which were first
printed in 1482, and afterwards went through several editions.
(Mendez, Typog., pp. 266 and 197.) I have one of Seville, 1500
(fol., 66 leaves). They are about one hundred and fifty in
number, and the prose gloss with which each is accompanied seems
in better taste and more becoming its position than it does in
the case of the rhymed proverbs of the Marquis.
In the latter part of his life, the fame of the Marquis of Santillana
was spread very widely. Juan de Mena says, that men came from
foreign countries merely to see him;[637] and the young Constable of
Portugal--the same prince who afterwards entered into the Catalonian
troubles, and claimed to be king of Aragon--formally asked him for his
poems, which the Marquis sent with a letter on the poetic art, by way
of introduction, written about 1455, and containing notices of such
Spanish poets as were his predecessors or contemporaries; a letter
which is, in fact, the most important single document we now possess
touching the early literature of Spain. It is one, too, which contrasts
favorably with the curious epistle he himself received on a similar
subject, twenty years before, from the Marquis of Villena, and shows
how much he was in advance of his age in the spirit of criticism and in
a well-considered love of letters.[638]
[637] In the Preface to the “Coronacion,” Obras, Alcalá, 1566,
12mo, f. 260.
[638] This important letter--which, from the notice of it
by Argote de Molina, (Nobleza, 1588, f. 335,) was a sort of
acknowledged introduction to the Cancionero of the Marquis--is
found, with learned notes to it, in the first volume of Sanchez.
The Constable of Portugal, to whom it was addressed, died in 1466.
Indeed, in all respects we can see that he was a remarkable man; one
thoroughly connected with his age and strong in its spirit. His conduct
in affairs, from his youth upwards, shows this. So does the tone of his
Proverbs, that of his letter to his imprisoned cousin, and that of his
poem on the death of Alvaro de Luna. He was a poet also, though not of
a high order; a man of much reading, when reading was rare;[639] and
a critic, who showed judgment, when judgment and the art of criticism
hardly went together. And, finally, he was the founder of an Italian
and courtly school in Spanish poetry; one, on the whole, adverse to
the national spirit, and finally overcome by it, and yet one that long
exercised a considerable sway, and at last contributed something to
the materials which, in the sixteenth century, went to build up and
constitute the proper literature of the country.
[639] I do not account him learned, because he had not the
accomplishment common to all learned men of his time,--that
of speaking Latin. This appears from the very quaint and rare
treatise of the “Vita Beata,” by Juan de Lucena, his contemporary
and friend, where (ed. 1483, fol., f. ii. b) the Marquis is made
to say, “Me veo defetuoso de letras Latinas,” and adds, that the
Bishop of Burgos and Juan de Mena would have carried on in Latin
the discussion recorded in that treatise, instead of carrying it
on in Spanish, if he had been able to join them in that learned
language. That the Marquis could _read_ Latin, however, is
probable from his works, which are full of allusions to Latin
authors, and sometimes contain imitations of them.
There lived, however, during the reign of John the Second, and in the
midst of his court, another poet, whose general influence at the time
was less felt than that of his patron, the Marquis of Santillana, but
who has since been oftener mentioned and remembered,--Juan de Mena,
sometimes, but inappropriately, called the Ennius of Spanish poetry.
He was born in Córdova, about the year 1411, the child of parents
respected, but not noble.[640] He was early left an orphan, and from
the age of three-and-twenty, of his own free choice, devoted himself
wholly to letters; going through a regular course of studies, first
at Salamanca, and afterwards at Rome. On his return home, he became
a _Veinte-quatro_ of Córdova, or one of the twenty-four persons who
constituted the government of the city; but we early find him at
court on a footing of familiarity as a poet, and we know he was soon
afterwards Latin secretary to John the Second, and historiographer of
Castile.[641] This brought him into relations with the king and the
Constable; relations important in themselves, and of which we have
by accident a few singular intimations. The king, if we can trust
the witness, was desirous to be well regarded in history; and, to
make sure of it, directed his confidential physician to instruct his
historiographer, from time to time, how he ought to treat different
parts of his subject. In one letter, for instance, he is told with
much gravity, “The king is very desirous of praise”; and then follows
a statement of facts, as they ought to be represented, in a somewhat
delicate case of the neglect of the Count de Castro to obey the royal
commands.[642] In another letter he is told, “The king expects much
glory from you”; a remark which is followed by another narrative of
facts as they should be set forth.[643] But though Juan de Mena was
employed on this important work as late as 1445, and apparently was
favored in it, both by the king and the Constable, still there is no
reason to suppose that any part of what he did is preserved in the
Chronicle of John the Second exactly as it came from his hands.
[640] The chief materials for the life of Juan de Mena are to be
found in some poor verses by Francisco Romero, in his “Epicedio
en la Muerte del Maestro Hernan Nuñez,” (Salamanca, 1578, 12mo,
pp. 485, etc.,) at the end of the “Refranes de Hernan Nuñez.”
Concerning the place of his birth there is no doubt. He alludes
to it himself (Trescientas, Copla 124) in a way that does him
honor.
[641] Cibdareal, Epist. XX., XXIII.
[642] Ibid., Epist. XLVII.
[643] Ibid., Epist. XLIX.
The chronicler, however, who seems to have been happy in possessing a
temperament proper for courtly success, has left proofs enough of the
means by which he reached it. He was a sort of poet-laureate without
the title, writing verses on the battle of Olmedo in 1445, on the
pacification between the king and his son in 1446, on the affair of
Peñafiel in 1449, and on the slight wound the Constable received at
Palencia in 1452; in all which, as well as in other and larger poems,
he shows a great devotion to the reigning powers of the state.[644]
[644] For the first verses, see Castro, Bibl. Española, Tom.
I. p. 331; and for those on the Constable, see his Chronicle,
Milano, 1546, fol., f. 60. b, Tít. 95.
He stood well, too, in Portugal. The Infante Don Pedro--a verse-writer
of some name, who travelled much in different parts of the
world--became personally acquainted with Juan de Mena in Spain, and,
on his return to Lisbon, addressed a few verses to him, better than
the answer they called forth; besides which, he imitated, with no
mean skill, Mena’s “Labyrinth,” in a Spanish poem of a hundred and
twenty-five stanzas.[645] With such connections and habits, with a wit
that made him agreeable in personal intercourse,[646] and with an even
good-humor which rendered him welcome to the opposite parties in the
kingdom,[647] he seems to have led a contented life; and at his death,
which happened suddenly in 1456, in consequence of a fall from his
mule, the Marquis of Santillana, always his friend and patron, wrote
his epitaph, and erected a monument to his memory in Torrelaguna, both
of which are still to be seen.[648]
[645] The verses inscribed “Do Ifante Dom Pedro, Fylho del
Rey Dom Joam, em Loor de Joam de Mena,” with Juan de Mena’s
answer, a short rejoinder by the Infante, and a conclusion,
are in the Cancioneiro de Rresende, (Lisboa, 1516, folio,) f.
72. b. See, also, Die Alten Liederbücher der Portugiesen, von
C. F. Bellermann, (Berlin, 1840, 4to, pp. 27, 64,) and Mendez,
Typographía (p. 137, note). This Infante Don Pedro is, I suppose,
the one alluded to as a great traveller in Don Quixote (Part II.,
end of Chap. 23); but Pellicer and Clemencin give us no light on
the matter.
[646] See the Dialogue of Juan de Lucena, “La Vita Beata,”
_passim_, in which Juan de Mena is one of the principal speakers.
[647] He stood well with the king and the Infantes, with the
Constable, with the Marquis of Santillana, etc.
[648] Ant. Ponz, Viage de España, Madrid, 1787, 12mo, Tom. X. p.
38. Clemencin, note to Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 44, Tom. V. p.
379.
The works of Juan de Mena evidently enjoyed the sunshine of courtly
favor from their first appearance. While still young, if we can trust
the simple-hearted letters that pass under the name of the royal
physician, they were already the subject of gossip at the palace;[649]
and the collections of poetry made by Baena and Estuñiga, for the
amusement of the king and the court, about 1450, contain abundant
proofs that his favor was not worn out by time; for as many of his
verses as could be found seem to have been put into each of them. But
though this circumstance, and that of their appearance before the end
of the century in two or three of the very earliest printed collections
of poetry, leave no doubt that they enjoyed, from the first, a sort
of fashionable success, still it can hardly be said they were at any
time really popular. Two or three of his shorter effusions, indeed,
like the verses addressed to his lady to show her how formidable she is
in every way, and those on a vicious mule he had bought from a friar,
have a spirit that would make them amusing anywhere.[650] But most
of his minor poems, of which about twenty may be found scattered in
rare books,[651] belong only to the fashionable style of the society
in which he lived, and, from their affectation, conceits, and obscure
allusions, can have had little value, even when they were first
circulated, except to the persons to whom they were addressed, or the
narrow circle in which those persons moved.
[649] Cibdareal, Epist. XX. No less than twelve of the hundred
and five letters of the courtly leech are addressed to the poet,
showing, if they are genuine, how much favor Juan de Mena enjoyed.
[650] The last, which is not without humor, is twice alluded to
in Cibdareal, viz., Epist. XXXIII. and XXXVI., and seems to have
been liked at court and by the king.
[651] The minor poems of Juan de Mena are to be found chiefly in
the old Cancioneros Generales; but some must be sought in the old
editions of his own works. For example, in the valuable folio
one of 1534, in which the “Trescientas” and the “Coronacion”
form separate publications, with separate titles, pagings, and
colophons, each is followed by a few of the author’s short poems.
His poem on the Seven Deadly Sins, in nearly eight hundred short
verses, divided into double _redondillas_, is a work of graver
pretensions. But it is a dull allegory, full of pedantry and
metaphysical fancies on the subject of a war between Reason and
the Will of Man. Notwithstanding its length, however, it was left
unfinished; and a certain friar, named Gerónimo de Olivares, added four
hundred more verses to it, in order to bring the discussion to what he
conceived a suitable conclusion. Both parts, however, are as tedious as
the theology of the age could make them.
His “Coronation” is better, and fills about five hundred lines,
arranged in double _quintillas_. Its name comes from its subject, which
is an imaginary journey of Juan de Mena to Mount Parnassus, in order
to witness the coronation of the Marquis of Santillana, both as a poet
and a hero, by the Muses and the Virtues. It is, therefore, strictly
a poem in honor of his great patron; and being such, it is somewhat
singular that it should be written in a light and almost satirical
vein. At the opening, as well as in other parts, it has the appearance
of a parody on the “Divina Commedia”; for it begins with the wanderings
of the author in an obscure wood, after which he passes through regions
of misery, where he beholds the punishments of the dead; visits the
abodes of the blessed, where he sees the great of former ages; and,
at last, comes to Mount Parnassus, where he is present at a sort of
apotheosis of the yet living object of his reverence and admiration.
The versification of the poem is easy, and some passages in it are
amusing; but, in general, it is rendered dull by unprofitable learning.
The best portions are those merely descriptive.
But whether Juan de Mena, in his “Coronation,” intended deliberately
to be the parodist of Dante or not, it is quite plain that in his
principal work, called “The Labyrinth,” he became Dante’s serious
imitator. This long poem--which he seems to have begun very early,
and which, though he occupied himself much with its composition, he
left unfinished at the time of his sudden death--consists of about
twenty-five hundred lines, divided into stanzas; each stanza being
composed of two _redondillas_ in those long lines which were then
called “versos de arte mayor,” or verses of higher art, because they
were supposed to demand a greater degree of skill than the shorter
verses used in the old national measures. The poem itself is sometimes
called “The Labyrinth,” probably from the intricacy of its plan,
and sometimes “The Three Hundred,” because that was originally the
number of its _coplas_ or stanzas. Its purpose is nothing less than
to teach, by vision and allegory, whatever relates to the duties or
the destiny of man; and the rules by which its author was governed in
its composition are evidently gathered from the example of Dante in
his “Divina Commedia,” and from Dante’s precepts in his treatise “De
Vulgari Eloquentia.”
After the dedication of the Labyrinth to John the Second, and some
other preparatory and formal parts, the poem opens with the author’s
wanderings in a wood, like Dante, exposed to beasts of prey. While
there, he is met by Providence, who comes to him in the form of a
beautiful woman, and offers to lead him, by a sure path, through the
dangers that beset him, and to explain, “as far as they are palpable
to human understanding,” the dark mysteries of life that oppress his
spirit. This promise she fulfils by carrying him to what she calls the
spherical centre of the five zones; or, in other words, to a point
where the poet is supposed to see at once all the countries and nations
of the earth. There she shows him three vast mystical wheels,--the
wheels of Destiny,--two representing the past and the future, in
constant rest, and the third representing the present, in constant
motion. Each contains its appropriate portion of the human race, and
through each are extended the seven circles of the seven planetary
influences that govern the fates of mortal men; the characters of the
most distinguished of whom are explained to the poet by his divine
guide, as their shadows rise before him in these mysterious circles.
From this point, therefore, the poem becomes a confused gallery of
mythological and historical portraits, arranged, as in the “Paradiso”
of Dante, according to the order of the seven planets.[652] They have
generally little merit, and are often shadowed forth very indistinctly.
The best sketches are those of personages who lived in the poet’s own
time or country; some drawn with courtly flattery, like the king’s and
the Constable’s; others with more truth, as well as more skill, like
those of the Marquis of Villena, Juan de Merlo, and the young Dávalos,
whose premature fate is recorded in a few lines of unwonted power and
tenderness.[653]
[652] The author of the “Diálogo de las Lenguas” (Mayans y
Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. p. 148) complained of the frequent
obscurities in Juan de Mena’s poetry, three centuries ago,--a
fault made abundantly apparent in the elaborate explanations
of his dark passages by the two oldest and most learned of his
commentators.
[653] Juan de Mena has always stood well with his countrymen,
if he has not been absolutely popular. Verses by him appeared,
during his lifetime, in the Cancionero of Baena, and immediately
afterwards in the Chronicle of the Constable. Others are in the
collection of poems already noticed, printed at Saragossa in
1492, and in another collection of the same period, but without
date. They are in all the old Cancioneros Generales, and in a
succession of separate editions, from 1496 to our own times. And
besides all this, the learned Hernan Nuñez de Guzman printed a
commentary on them in 1499, and the still more learned Francisco
Sanchez de las Brozas, commonly called El Brocense, printed
another in 1582; one or the other of which accompanies the poems
for their elucidation in nearly every edition since.
The story told most in detail is that of the Count de Niebla, who, in
1436, at the siege of Gibraltar, sacrificed his own life in a noble
attempt to save that of one of his dependants; the boat in which the
Count might have been rescued being too small to save the whole of the
party, who thus all perished together in a flood-tide. This disastrous
event, and especially the self-devotion of Niebla, who was one of the
principal nobles of the kingdom, and at that moment employed on a
daring expedition against the Moors, are recorded in the chronicles of
the age, and introduced by Juan de Mena in the following characteristic
stanzas:[654]--
[654] Crónica de D. Juan el Segundo, Año 1436, c. 3. Mena,
Trescientas, Cop. 160-162.
Aquel que en la barca parece sentado,
Vestido, en engaño de las bravas ondas,
En aguas crueles, ya mas que no hondas,
Con mucha gran gente en la mar anegado,
Es el valiente, no bien fortunado,
Muy virtuoso, perínclito Conde
De Niebla, que todos sabeis bien adonde
Dió fin al dia del curso hadado.
Y los que lo cercan por el derredor,
Puesto que fuessen magníficos hombres,
Los títulos todos de todos sus nombres,
El nombre les cubre de aquel su señor;
Que todos los hechos que son de valor
Para se mostrar por sí cada uno,
Quando se juntan y van de consuno,
Pierden el nombre delante el mayor.
Arlanza, Pisuerga, y aun Carrion,
Gozan de nombre de rios; empero
Despues de juntados llamamos los Duero;
Hacemos de muchos una relacion.
And he who seems to sit upon that bark,
Invested by the cruel waves, that wait
And welter round him to prepare his fate,--
His and his bold companions’, in their dark
And watery abyss;--that stately form
Is Count Niebla’s, he whose honored name,
More brave than fortunate, has given to fame
The very tide that drank his life-blood warm.
And they that eagerly around him press,
Though men of noble mark and bold emprise,
Grow pale and dim as his full glories rise,
Showing their own peculiar honors less.
Thus Carrion or Arlanza, sole and free,
Bears, like Pisuerga, each its several name,
And triumphs in its undivided fame,
As a fair, graceful stream. But when the three