collections found in the old Cancioneros Generales. Of the earliest
poetry of the country, such as it is found in the legend of the Cid, in
Berceo, and in the Archpriest of Hita, they afford not a trace; and if
a few ballads are inserted, it is for the sake of the poor glosses with
which they are encumbered. But the Provençal spirit of the Troubadours
is everywhere present, if not everywhere strongly marked; and
occasionally we find imitations of the earlier Italian school of Dante
and his immediate followers, which are more apparent than successful.
The mass is wearisome and monotonous. Nearly every one of the longer
poems contained in it is composed in lines of eight syllables, divided
into _redondillas_, almost always easy in their movement, but rarely
graceful; sometimes broken by a regularly recurring verse of only four
or five syllables, and hence called _quebrado_, but more frequently
arranged in stanzas of eight or ten uniform lines. It is nearly all
amatory, and the amatory portions are nearly all metaphysical and
affected. It is of the court, courtly; overstrained, formal, and cold.
What is not written by persons of rank is written for their pleasure;
and though the spirit of a chivalrous age is thus sometimes brought
out, yet what is best in that spirit is concealed by a prevalent desire
to fall in with the superficial fashions and fantastic fancies that at
last destroyed it.
But it was impossible such a wearisome state of poetical culture should
become permanent in a country so full of stirring interests as Spain
was in the age that followed the fall of Granada and the discovery of
America. Poetry, or at least the love of poetry, made progress with
the great advancement of the nation under Ferdinand and Isabella;
though the taste of the court in whatever regarded Spanish literature
continued low and false. Other circumstances, too, favored the great
and beneficial change that was everywhere becoming apparent. The
language of Castile had already asserted its supremacy, and, with the
old Castilian spirit and cultivation, it was spreading into Andalusia
and Aragon, and planting itself amidst the ruins of the Moorish power
on the shores of the Mediterranean. Chronicle-writing was become
frequent, and had begun to take the forms of regular history. The drama
was advanced as far as the “Celestina” in prose, and the more strictly
scenic efforts of Torres Naharro in verse. Romance-writing was at the
height of its success. And the old ballad spirit--the true foundation
of Spanish poetry--had received a new impulse and richer materials
from the contests in which all Christian Spain had borne a part amidst
the mountains of Granada, and from the wild tales of the feuds and
adventures of rival factions within the walls of that devoted city.
Every thing, indeed, announced a decided movement in the literature of
the nation, and almost every thing seemed to favor and facilitate it.
CHAPTER XXIV.
SPANISH INTOLERANCE.--THE INQUISITION.--PERSECUTION OF JEWS AND
MOORS.--PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS FOR OPINION.--STATE OF THE PRESS IN
SPAIN.--CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE WHOLE PERIOD.
The condition of things in Spain at the end of the reign of Ferdinand
and Isabella seemed, as we have intimated, to announce a long period of
national prosperity. But one institution, destined soon to discourage
and check that intellectual freedom without which there can be no wise
and generous advancement in any people, was already beginning to give
token of its great and blighting power.
The Christian Spaniards had, from an early period, been essentially
intolerant. To their perpetual wars with the Moors had been added,
from the end of the fourteenth century, an exasperated feeling against
the Jews, which the government had vainly endeavoured to control, and
which had shown itself, at different times, in the plunder and murder
of multitudes of that devoted race throughout the country. Both races
were hated by the mass of the Spanish people with a bitter hatred: the
first as their conquerors; the last for the oppressive claims their
wealth had given them on great numbers of the Christian inhabitants.
In relation to both, it was never forgotten that they were the enemies
of that cross under which all true Spaniards had for centuries gone to
battle; and of both it was taught by the priesthood, and willingly
believed by the laity, that their opposition to the faith of Christ
was an offence against God, which it was a merit in his people to
punish.[734] Columbus wearing the cord of Saint Francis in the streets
of Seville, and consecrating to wars against misbelief in Asia the
wealth he was seeking in the New World, whose soil he earnestly desired
should never be trodden by any foot save that of a Roman Catholic
Christian, was but a type of the Spanish character in the age when he
adopted it.[735]
[734] The bitterness of this unchristian and barbarous hatred
of the Moors, that constituted not a little of the foundation
on which rested the intolerance that afterwards did so much to
break down the intellectual independence of the Spanish people,
can hardly be credited at the present day, when stated in general
terms. An instance of its operation, must, therefore, be given to
illustrate its intensity. When the Spaniards made one of those
forays into the territories of the Moors that were so common for
centuries, the Christian knights, on their return, often brought,
dangling at their saddle-bows, the heads of the Moors they had
slain, and threw them to the boys in the streets of the villages,
to exasperate their young hatred against the enemies of their
faith;--a practice which, we are told on good authority, was
continued as late as the war of the Alpuxarras, under Don John of
Austria, in the reign of Philip II. (Clemencin, in Memorias de
la Acad. de Hist., Tom. VI. p. 390.) But any body who will read
the “Historia de la Rebelion y Castigo de los Moriscos del Reyno
de Granada,” by Luis del Marmol Carvajal, (Málaga, 1600, fol.,)
will see how complacently an eyewitness, not so much disposed
as most of his countrymen to look with hatred on the Moors,
regarded cruelties which it is not possible now to read without
shuddering. See his account of the murder, by order of the
chivalrous Don John of Austria, (f. 192,) of four hundred women
and children, his captives at Galera;--“muchos en su presencia,”
says the historian, who was there. Similar remarks might be made
about the second volume of Hita’s “Guerras de Granada,” which
will be noticed hereafter. Indeed, it is only by reading such
books that it is possible to learn how much the Spanish character
was impaired and degraded by this hatred, inculcated, during the
nine centuries that elapsed between the age of Roderic the Goth
and that of Philip III., not only as a part of the loyalty of
which all Spaniards were so proud, but as a religious duty of
every Christian in the kingdom.
[735] Bernaldez, Chrónica, c. 131, MS. Navarrete, Coleccion de
Viages, Tom. I. p. 72; Tom. II. p. 282.
When, therefore, it was proposed to establish in Spain the Inquisition,
which had been so efficiently used to exterminate the heresy of the
Albigenses, and which had even followed its victims in their flight
from Provence to Aragon, little serious opposition was made to the
undertaking. Ferdinand, perhaps, was not unwilling to see a power
grow up near his throne with which the political government of the
country could hardly fail to be in alliance, while the piety of the
wiser Isabella, which, as we can see from her correspondence with her
confessor, was little enlightened, led her conscience so completely
astray, that she finally asked for the introduction of the Holy Office
into her own dominions as a Christian benefit to her people.[736] After
a negotiation with the court of Rome, and some changes in the original
project, it was therefore established in the city of Seville in 1481;
the first Grand Inquisitors being Dominicans and their first meeting
being held in a convent of their order, on the 2d of January. Its
earliest victims were Jews. Six were burned within four days from the
time when the tribunal first sat, and Mariana states the whole number
of those who suffered in Andalusia alone during the first year of its
existence at two thousand, besides seventeen thousand who underwent
some form of punishment less severe than that of the stake;[737] all,
it should be remembered, being done with the rejoicing assent of the
mass of the people, whose shouts followed the exile of the whole body
of the Jewish race from Spain in 1492, and whose persecution of the
Hebrew blood, wherever found, and however hidden under the disguises of
conversion and baptism, has hardly ceased down to our own days.[738]
[736] Prescott’s Ferdinand and Isabella, Part I. c. 7.
[737] Mariana, Hist., Lib. XXIV. c. 17, ed. 1780, Tom. II. p.
527. We are shocked and astonished, as we read this chapter;--so
devout a gratitude does it express for the Inquisition as a
national blessing. See also Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition,
Tom. I. p. 160.
[738] The eloquent Father Lacordaire, in the sixth chapter
of his “Mémoire pour le Rétablissement de l’Ordre des Frères
Prêcheurs,” (Paris, 1839, 8vo,) endeavours to prove that the
Dominicans were not in anyway responsible for the establishment
of the Inquisition in Spain. In this attempt I think he fails;
but I think he is successful when he elsewhere maintains that the
Inquisition, from an early period, was intimately connected with
the political government in Spain, and always dependent on the
state for a large part of its power.
The fall of Granada, which preceded by a few months this cruel
expulsion of the Jews, placed the remains of the Moorish nation no
less at the mercy of their conquerors. It is true, that, by the treaty
which surrendered the city to the Catholic sovereigns, the property of
the vanquished, their religious privileges, their mosques, and their
worship were solemnly secured to them; but in Spain, whatever portion
of the soil the Christians had wrested from their ancient enemies had
always been regarded only as so much territory restored to its rightful
owners, and any stipulations that might accompany its recovery were
rarely respected. The spirit and even the terms of the capitulation of
Granada were, therefore, soon violated. The Christian laws of Spain
were introduced there; the Inquisition followed; and a persecution
of the descendants of the old Arab invaders was begun by their new
masters, which, after being carried on above a century with constantly
increasing crimes, was ended in 1609, like the persecution of the Jews,
by the forcible expulsion of the whole race.[739]
[739] See the learned and acute “Histoire des Maures Mudejares
et des Morisques, ou des Arabes d’Espagne sous la Domination des
Chrétiens,” par le Comte Albert de Circourt, (3 tom. 8vo, Paris,
1846,) Tom. II., _passim_.
Such severity brought with it, of course, a great amount of fraud and
falsehood. Multitudes of the followers of Mohammed--beginning with four
thousand whom Cardinal Ximenes baptized on the day when, contrary to
the provisions of the capitulation of Granada, he consecrated the great
mosque of the Albaycin as a Christian temple--were forced to enter
the fold of the Church, without either understanding its doctrines or
desiring to receive its instructions. With these, as with the converted
Jews, the Inquisition was permitted to deal unchecked by the power of
the state. They were, therefore, from the first, watched; soon they
were imprisoned; and then they were tortured, to obtain proof that
their conversion was not genuine. But it was all done in secrecy and in
darkness. From the moment when the Inquisition laid its grasp on the
object of its suspicions to that of his execution, no voice was heard
to issue from its cells. The very witnesses it summoned were punished
with death or perpetual imprisonment, if they revealed what they had
seen or heard before its dread tribunals; and often of the victim
nothing was known, but that he had disappeared from his accustomed
haunts in society, never again to be seen.
The effect was appalling. The imaginations of men were filled with
horror at the idea of a power so vast and so noiseless; one which was
constantly, but invisibly, around them; whose blow was death, but
whose steps could neither be heard nor followed amidst the gloom into
which it retreated farther and farther as efforts were made to pursue
it. From its first establishment, therefore, while the great body of
the Spanish Christians rejoiced in the purity and orthodoxy of their
faith, and not unwillingly saw its enemies called to expiate their
unbelief by the most terrible of mortal punishments, the intellectual
and cultivated portions of society felt the sense of their personal
security gradually shaken, until, at last, it became an anxious object
of their lives to avoid the suspicions of a tribunal which infused into
their minds a terror deeper and more effectual in proportion as it was
accompanied by a misgiving how far they might conscientiously oppose
its authority. Many of the nobler and more enlightened, especially on
the comparatively free soil of Aragon, struggled against an invasion of
their rights whose consequences they partly foresaw. But the powers of
the government and the Church, united in measures which were sustained
by the passions and religion of the lower classes of society, became
irresistible. The fires of the Inquisition were gradually lighted over
the whole country, and the people everywhere thronged to witness its
sacrifices, as acts of faith and devotion.
From this moment, Spanish intolerance, which through the Moorish wars
had accompanied the contest and shared its chivalrous spirit, took that
air of sombre fanaticism which it never afterwards lost. Soon, its
warfare was turned against the opinions and thoughts of men, even more
than against their external conduct or their crimes. The Inquisition,
which was its true exponent and appropriate instrument, gradually
enlarged its own jurisdiction by means of crafty abuses, as well as by
the regular forms of law, until none found himself too humble to escape
its notice, or too high to be reached by its power. The whole land bent
under its influence, and the few who comprehended the mischief that
must follow bowed, like the rest, to its authority, or were subjected
to its punishments.
From an inquiry into the private opinions of individuals to an
interference with the press and with printed books there was but a
step. It was a step, however, that was not taken at once; partly
because books were still few and of little comparative importance
anywhere, and partly because, in Spain, they had already been subjected
to the censorship of the civil authority, which, in this particular,
seemed unwilling to surrender its jurisdiction. But such scruples were
quickly removed by the appearance and progress of the Reformation of
Luther; a revolution which comes within the next period of the history
of Spanish literature, when we shall find displayed in their broad
practical results the influence of the spirit of intolerance and the
power of the Church and the Inquisition on the character of the Spanish
people.
* * * * *
If, however, before we enter upon this new and more varied period, we
cast our eyes back towards the one over which we have just passed,
we shall find much that is original and striking, and much that
gives promise of further progress and success. It extends through
nearly four complete centuries, from the first breathings of the
poetical enthusiasm of the mass of the people down to the decay of
the courtly literature in the latter part of the reign of Ferdinand
and Isabella; and it is filled with materials destined, at last, to
produce such a school of poetry and elegant prose as, in the sober
judgment of the nation itself, still constitutes the proper body of
the national literature. The old ballads, the old historical poems,
the old chronicles, the old theatre,--all these, if only elements,
are yet elements of a vigor and promise not to be mistaken. They
constitute a mine of more various wealth than had been offered, under
similar circumstances and at so early a period, to any other people.
They breathe a more lofty and a more heroic temper. We feel, as we
listen to their tones, that we are amidst the stir of extraordinary
passions, which give the character an elevation not elsewhere to be
found in the same unsettled state of society. We feel, though the
grosser elements of life are strong around us, that imagination is
yet stronger; imparting to them its manifold hues, and giving them a
power and a grace that form a striking contrast with what is wild or
rude in their original nature. In short, we feel that we are called to
witness the first efforts of a generous people to emancipate themselves
from the cold restraints of a merely material existence, and watch
with confidence and sympathy the movement of their secret feelings and
prevalent energies, as they are struggling upwards into the poetry of a
native and earnest enthusiasm; persuaded that they must, at last, work
out for themselves a literature, bold, fervent, and original, marked
with the features and impulses of the national character, and able to
vindicate for itself a place among the permanent monuments of modern
civilization.[740]
[740] It is impossible to speak of the Inquisition as I have
spoken in this chapter, without feeling desirous to know
something concerning Antonio Llorente, who has done more than
all other persons to expose its true history and character. The
important facts in his life are few. He was born at Calahorra
in Aragon in 1756, and entered the Church early, but devoted
himself to the study of canon law and of elegant literature. In
1789, he was made principal secretary to the Inquisition, and
became much interested in its affairs; but was dismissed from his
place and exiled to his parish in 1791, because he was suspected
of an inclination towards the French philosophy of the period.
In 1793, a more enlightened General Inquisitor than the one who
had persecuted him drew Llorente again into the councils of the
Holy Office, and, with the assistance of Jovellanos and other
leading statesmen, he endeavoured to introduce such changes
into the tribunal itself as should obtain publicity for its
proceedings. But this, too, failed, and Llorente was disgraced
anew. In 1805, however, he was recalled to Madrid; and in 1809,
when the fortunes of Joseph Bonaparte made him the nominal king
of Spain, he gave Llorente charge of every thing relating to the
archives and the affairs of the Inquisition. Llorente used well
the means thus put into his hands; and having been compelled to
follow the government of Joseph to Paris, after its overthrow in
Spain, he published there, from the vast and rich materials he
had collected during the period when he had entire control of
the secret records of the Inquisition, an ample history of its
conduct and crimes;--a work which, though neither well arranged
nor philosophically written, is yet the great store-house from
which are to be drawn more well-authenticated facts relating to
the subject it discusses than can be found in all other sources
put together. But neither in Paris, where he lived in poverty,
was Llorente suffered to live in peace. In 1823, he was required
by the French government to leave France, and being obliged to
make his journey during a rigorous season, when he was already
much broken by age and its infirmities, he died from fatigue
and exhaustion, on the 3d of February, a few days after his
arrival at Madrid. His “Histoire de l’Inquisition” (4 tom., 8vo,
Paris, 1817-1818) is his great work; but we should add to it
his “Noticia Biográfica,” (Paris, 1818, 12mo,) which is curious
and interesting, not only as an autobiography, but for further
notices respecting the spirit of the Inquisition.
HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.
SECOND PERIOD.
THE LITERATURE THAT EXISTED IN SPAIN FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE
AUSTRIAN FAMILY TO ITS EXTINCTION, OR FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY TO THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH.
HISTORY
OF
SPANISH LITERATURE.
SECOND PERIOD.
CHAPTER I.
PERIODS OF LITERARY SUCCESS AND NATIONAL GLORY.--CHARLES THE
FIFTH.--HOPES OF UNIVERSAL EMPIRE.--LUTHER.--CONTEST OF THE
ROMISH CHURCH WITH PROTESTANTISM.--PROTESTANT BOOKS.--THE
INQUISITION.--INDEX EXPURGATORIUS.--SUPPRESSION OF PROTESTANTISM IN
SPAIN.--PERSECUTION.--RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY AND ITS
EFFECTS.
In every country that has yet obtained a rank among those nations
whose intellectual cultivation is the highest, the period in which it
has produced the permanent body of its literature has been that of
its glory as a state. The reason is obvious. There is then a spirit
and activity abroad among the elements that constitute the national
character, which naturally express themselves in such poetry and
eloquence as, being the result of the excited condition of the people
and bearing its impress, become for all future exertions a model
and standard that can be approached only when the popular character
is again stirred by a similar enthusiasm. Thus, the age of Pericles
naturally followed the great Persian war; the age of Augustus was that
of a universal tranquillity produced by universal conquest; the age
of Molière and La Fontaine was that in which Louis the Fourteenth was
carrying the outposts of his consolidated monarchy far into Germany;
and the ages of Elizabeth and Anne were the ages of the Armada and of
Marlborough.
Just so it was in Spain. The central point in Spanish history is the
capture of Granada. During nearly eight centuries before that decisive
event, the Christians of the Peninsula were occupied with conflicts
at home, that gradually developed their energies, amidst the sternest
trials and struggles, till the whole land was filled to overflowing
with a power which had hardly yet been felt in the rest of Europe.
But no sooner was the last Moorish fortress yielded up, than this
accumulated flood broke loose from the mountains behind which it had
so long been hidden, and threatened, at once, to overspread the best
portions of the civilized world. In less than thirty years, Charles the
Fifth, who had inherited, not only Spain, but Naples, Sicily, and the
Low Countries, and into whose treasury the untold wealth of the Indies
was already beginning to pour, was elected Emperor of Germany, and
undertook a career of foreign conquest such as had not been imagined
since the days of Charlemagne. Success and glory seemed to wait for him
as he advanced. In Europe, he extended his empire, till it checked the
hated power of Islamism in Turkey; in Africa, he garrisoned Tunis and
overawed the whole coast of Barbary; in America, Cortés and Pizarro
were his bloody lieutenants, and achieved for him conquests more vast
than were conceived in the dreams of Alexander; while, beyond the
wastes of the Pacific, he stretched his discoveries to the Philippines,
and so completed the circuit of the globe.
This was the brilliant aspect which the fortunes of his country
offered to an intelligent and imaginative Spaniard in the first half
of the sixteenth century.[741] For, as we well know, such men then
looked forward with confidence to the time when Spain would be the
head of an empire more extensive than the Roman, and seem sometimes
to have trusted that they themselves should live to witness and share
its glory. But their forecast was imperfect. A moral power was at
work, destined to divide Europe anew, and place the domestic policy
and the external relations of its principal countries upon unwonted
foundations. The monk Luther was already become a counterpoise to the
military master of so many kingdoms; and from 1552, when Moritz of
Saxony deserted the Imperial standard, and the convention of Passau
asserted for the Protestants the free exercise of their religion, the
clear-sighted conqueror may himself have understood, that his ambitious
hopes of a universal empire, whose seat should be in the South of
Europe and whose foundations should be laid in the religion of the
Church of Rome, were at an end.
[741] Traces of this feeling are found abundantly in Spanish
literature, for above a century; but nowhere, perhaps, with
more simplicity and good faith than in a sonnet of Hernando de
Acuña,--a soldier and a poet greatly favored by Charles V.--in
which he announces to the world, for its “great consolation,” as
he says, “promised by Heaven,”--
Un Monarca, un Imperio, y una Espada.
Poesías, Madrid, 1804, 12mo, p. 214.
Christóval de Mesa, however, may be considered more
simple-hearted yet; for, fifty years afterwards, he announces
this catholic and universal empire as absolutely completed by
Philip III. Restauracion de España, Madrid, 1607, 12mo, Canto I.
st. 7.
But the question, where the line should be drawn between the great
contending parties, was long the subject of fierce wars. The struggle
began with the enunciation of Luther’s ninety-five propositions, and
his burning the Pope’s bulls at Wittenberg. It was ended, as far as
it is yet ended, by the peace of Westphalia. During the hundred and
thirty years that elapsed between these two points, Spain was indeed
far removed from the fields where the most cruel battles of the
religious wars were fought; but how deep was the interest the Spanish
people took in the contest is plain from the bitterness of their
struggle against the Protestant princes of Germany; from the vast
efforts they made to crush the Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands;
from the expedition of the Armada against Protestant England; and from
the interference of Philip the Second in the affairs of Henry the Third
and Henry the Fourth, when, during the League, Protestantism seemed
to be gaining ground in France;--in short, it may be seen from the
presence of Spain and her armies in every part of Europe, where it was
possible to reach and assail the great movement of the Reformation.
Those, however, who were so eager to check the power of Protestantism
when it was afar off would not be idle when the danger drew near to
their own homes.[742] The first alarm seems to have come from Rome.
In March, 1521, Papal briefs were sent to Spain, warning the Spanish
government to prevent the further introduction of books written by
Luther and his followers, which, it was believed, had been secretly
penetrating into the country for about a year. These briefs, it should
be observed, were addressed to the civil administration, which still,
in form at least, kept an entire control over such subjects. But it was
more natural, and more according to the ideas then prevalent in other
countries as well as in Spain, to look to the ecclesiastical power for
remedies in a matter connected with religion; and the great body of the
Spanish people seems willingly to have done so. In less than a month,
therefore, from the date of the briefs in question, and perhaps even
before they were received in Spain, the Grand Inquisitor addressed an
order to the tribunals under his jurisdiction, requiring them to search
for and seize all books supposed to contain the doctrines of the new
heresy. It was a bold measure, but it was a successful one.[743] The
government gladly countenanced it; for, in whatever form Protestantism
appeared, it came with more or less of the spirit of resistance to
all the favorite projects of the Emperor; and the people countenanced
it, because, except a few scattered individuals, all true Spaniards
regarded Luther and his followers with hardly more favor than they did
Mohammed or the Jews.
[742] The facts in the subsequent account of the progress and
suppression of the Protestant Reformation in Spain are taken,
in general, from the “Histoire Critique de l’Inquisition
d’Espagne,” par J. A. Llorente, (Paris, 1817-1818, 4 tom., 8vo,)
and the “History of the Reformation in Spain,” by Thos. McCrie,
Edinburgh, 1829, 8vo.
[743] The Grand Inquisitors had always shown an instinctive
desire to obtain jurisdiction over books, whether printed or
manuscript. Torquemada, the fiercest, if not quite the first of
them, burned at Seville, in 1490, a quantity of Hebrew Bibles
and other manuscripts, on the ground that they were the work
of Jews; and at Salamanca, subsequently, he destroyed, in the
same way, six thousand volumes more, on the ground that they
were books of magic and sorcery. But in all this he proceeded,
not by virtue of his Inquisitorial office, but, as Barrientos
had done forty years before, (see _ante_, p. 359,) by direct
royal authority. Until 1521, therefore, the press remained in
the hands of the _Oidores_, or judges of the higher courts, and
other persons civil and ecclesiastical, who, from the first
appearance of printing in the country, and certainly for above
twenty years after that period, had granted, by special power
from the sovereigns, whatever licenses were deemed necessary
for the printing and circulation of books. Llorente, Hist. de
l’Inquisition, Tom. I. pp. 281, 456. Mendez, Typographía, pp. 51,
331, 375.
Meantime, the Supreme Council, as the highest body in the Inquisition
was called, proceeded in their work with a firm and equal step. By
successive decrees, between 1521 and 1535, it was ordained, that all
persons who kept in their possession books infected with the doctrines
of Luther, and even all who failed to denounce such persons, should
be excommunicated and subjected to degrading punishments. This gave
the Inquisition a right to inquire into the contents and character of
whatever books were already printed. Next, they arrogated to themselves
the power to determine what books might be sent to the press; claiming
it gradually and with little noise, but effectually,[744] and if, at
first, without any direct grant of authority from the Pope or from the
king of Spain, still necessarily with the implied assent of both, and
generally with means furnished by one or the other. At last, a sure
expedient was found, which left no doubt of the process to be used, and
very little as to the results that would follow.
[744] I notice in a few works printed before 1550, that the
Inquisition, without formal authority, began quietly to take
cognizance and control of books that were about to be published.
Thus, in a curious treatise on Exchange, “Tratado de Cambios,”
by Cristóval de Villalon, printed at Valladolid in 1541, 4to,
the title-page declares that it had been “visto por los Señores
Inquisidores”; and in Pero Mexia’s “Silva de Varia Leccion,”
(Sevilla, 1543, folio,) though the title gives the imperial
license for printing, the colophon adds that of the Apostolical
Inquisitor. There was no reason for either, except the anxiety
of the author to be safe from an authority which rested on no
law, but which was already recognized as formidable. Similar
remarks may be made about the “Theórica de Virtudes” of Castilla,
which was formally licensed, in 1536, by Alonso Manrique, the
Inquisitor-General, though it was dedicated to the Emperor, and
bears the Imperial authority to print.
In 1539, Charles the Fifth obtained a Papal bull authorizing him to
procure from the University of Louvain, in Flanders, where the Lutheran
controversy would naturally be better understood than in Spain, a
list of books dangerous to be introduced into his dominions. It was
printed in 1546, and was the first “Index Expurgatorius” published in
Spain, and the second in the world. Subsequently it was submitted by
the Emperor to the Supreme Council of the Inquisition, under whose
authority additions were made to it; after which it was promulgated
anew in 1550, thus consummating the Inquisitorial jurisdiction over
this great lever of modern progress and civilization,--a jurisdiction,
it should be noted, which was confirmed and enforced by the most
tremendous of all human penalties, when, in 1558, Philip the Second
ordained the punishments of confiscation and death against any person
who should sell, buy, or keep in his possession any book prohibited by
the Index Expurgatorius of the Inquisition.[745]
[745] Peignot, Essai sur la Liberté d’Écrire, Paris, 1832, 8vo,
pp. 55, 61. Baillet, Jugemens des Savans, Amsterdam, 1725, 12mo,
Tom. II. Partie I. p. 43. Father Paul Sarpi’s remarkable account
of the origin of the Inquisition, and of the Index Expurgatorius
of Venice, which was the first ever printed, Opere, Helmstadt,
1763, 4to, Tom. IV. pp. 1-67. Llorente, Hist. de l’Inquisition,
Tom. I. pp. 459-464, 470. Vogt, Catalogus Librorum Rariorum,
Hamburgi, 1753, 8vo, pp. 367-369. So much for Europe. Abroad it
was worse. From 1550, a certificate was obliged to accompany
_every_ book, setting forth, that it was _not_ a prohibited book,
without which certificate, _no_ book was permitted to be _sold_
or _read_ in the colonies. (Llorente, Tom. I. p. 467.) But thus
far the Inquisition, in relation to the Index Expurgatorius,
consulted the civil authorities, or was specially authorized
by them to act. In 1640 this ceremony was no longer observed,
and the Index was printed by the Inquisition alone, without any
commission from the civil government. From the time when the
danger of the heresy of Luther became considerable, no books
arriving from Germany and France were permitted to be circulated
in Spain, except by special license. Bisbe y Vidal, Tratado de
Comedias, Barcelona, 1618, 12mo, f. 55.
The contest with Protestantism in Spain, under such auspices,
was short. It began in earnest and in blood about 1559, and was
substantially ended in 1570. At one period, the new doctrine had made
some progress in the monasteries and among the clergy; and though it
never became formidable from the numbers it enlisted, yet many of
those who joined its standard were distinguished by their learning,
their rank, or their general intelligence. But the higher and more
shining the mark, the more it attracted notice and the more surely it
was reached. The Inquisition had already existed seventy years and
was at the height of its power and favor. Cardinal Ximenes, one of
the boldest and most far-sighted statesmen, and one of the sternest
bigots the world ever saw, had for a long period united in his own
person the office of Civil Administrator of Spain with that of Grand
Inquisitor, and had used the extraordinary powers such a position
gave him to confirm the Inquisition at home and to spread it over the
newly discovered continent of America.[746] His successor was Cardinal
Adrien, the favored preceptor of Charles the Fifth, who filled nearly
two years the places of Grand Inquisitor and of Pope; so that, for
a season, the highest ecclesiastical authority was made to minister
to the power of the Inquisition in Spain, as the highest political
authority had done before.[747] And now, after an interval of twenty
years, had come Philip the Second, wary, inflexible, unscrupulous, at
the head of an empire on which, it was boasted, the sun never set,
consecrating all his own great energies and all the resources of his
vast dominions to the paramount object of extirpating every form of
heresy from the countries under his control, and consolidating the
whole into one grand religious empire.
[746] Cardinal Ximenes was really equal to the position these
extraordinary offices gave him, and exercised his great
authority with sagacity and zeal, and with a confidence in the
resources of his own genius that seemed to double his power. It
should, however, never be forgotten, that, _but for him_, the
Inquisition, instead of being enlarged, as it was, twenty years
after its establishment, would have been constrained within
comparatively narrow limits, and probably soon overthrown.
For, in 1512, when the embarrassments of the public treasury
inclined Ferdinand to accept from the persecuted new converts a
large sum of money, which he needed to carry on his war against
Navarre,--a gift which they offered on the single and most
righteous condition, that witnesses cited before the Inquisition
should be examined _publicly_,--Cardinal Ximenes not only used
his influence with the king to prevent him from accepting the
offer, but furnished him with resources that made its acceptance
unnecessary. And again, in 1517, when Charles V., young and not
without generous impulses, received, on the same just condition,
from the same oppressed Christians, a still larger offer of money
to defray his expenses in taking possession of his kingdom,
and when he had obtained assurances of the reasonableness of
granting their request from the principal universities and men of
learning in Spain and in Flanders, Cardinal Ximenes interposed
anew his great influence, and--not without some suppression of
the truth--prevented a second time the acceptance of the offer.
He, too, it was, who arranged the jurisdiction of the tribunals
of the Inquisition in the different provinces, settling them on
deeper and more solid foundations; and, finally, it was this
master spirit of his time who first carried the Inquisition
beyond the limits of Spain, establishing it in Oran, which was
his personal conquest, and in the Canaries, and Cuba, where
he made provident arrangements, by virtue of which it was
subsequently extended through all Spanish America. And yet,
before he wielded the power of the Inquisition, he opposed its
establishment. Llorente, Hist., Chap. X., Art. 5 and 7.
[747] Llorente, Tom. I. p. 419.
Still, the Inquisition, regarded as the chief outward means of driving
the Lutheran doctrines from Spain, might have failed to achieve its
work, if the people, as well as the government, had not been its
earnest allies. But, on all such subjects, the current in Spain had,
from the first, taken only one direction. Spaniards had contended
against misbelief with so implacable a hatred, for centuries, that the
spirit of that old contest had become one of the elements of their
national existence; and now, having expelled the Jews and reduced the
Moors to submission, they turned themselves, with the same fervent
zeal, to purify their soil from what they trusted would prove the last
trace of heretical pollution. To achieve this great object, Pope Paul
the Fourth, in 1558,--the same year in which Philip the Second had
decreed the most odious and awful penalties of the civil government in
aid of the Inquisition,--granted a brief, by which all the preceding
dispositions of the Church against heretics were confirmed, and the
tribunals of the Inquisition were authorized and required to proceed
against all persons supposed to be infected with the new belief, even
though such persons might be bishops, archbishops, or cardinals,
dukes, princes, kings, or emperors;--a power which, taken in all
its relations, was more formidable to the progress of intellectual
improvement than had ever before been granted to any body of men, civil
or ecclesiastical.[748]
[748] Llorente, Tom. II. pp. 183, 184.
The portentous authority thus given was at once freely exercised. The
first public _auto da fé_ of Protestants was held at Valladolid in
1559, and others followed, both there and elsewhere.[749] The royal
family was occasionally present; several persons of rank suffered;
and a general popular favor evidently followed the horrors that were
perpetrated. The number of victims was not large when compared with
earlier periods, seldom exceeding twenty burned at one time, and fifty
or sixty subjected to cruel and degrading punishments; but many of
those who suffered were, as the nature of the crimes alleged against
them implied, among the leading and active minds of their age. Men of
learning were particularly obnoxious to suspicion, since the cause of
Protestantism appealed directly to learning for its support. Sanchez,
the best classical scholar of his time in Spain, Luis de Leon, the
best Hebrew critic and the most eloquent preacher, and Mariana, the
chief Spanish historian, with other men of letters of inferior name and
consideration, were summoned before the tribunals of the Inquisition,
in order that they might at least avow their submission to its
authority, even if they were not subjected to its censures.
[749] Ibid., Tom. II., Chap. XX., XXI., and XXIV.
Nor were persons of the holiest lives and the most ascetic tempers
beyond the reach of its mistrust, if they but showed a tendency to
inquiry. Thus, Juan de Avila, known under the title of the Apostle
of Andalusia, and Luis de Granada, the devout mystic, with Teresa de
Jesus and Juan de la Cruz, both of whom were afterwards canonized by
the Church of Rome, all passed through its cells, or in some shape
underwent its discipline. So did some of the ecclesiastics most
distinguished by their rank and authority. Carranza, Archbishop of
Toledo and Primate of Spain, after being tormented eighteen years by
its persecutions, died, at last, in craven submission to its power;
and Cazella, who had been a favorite chaplain of the Emperor Charles
the Fifth, perished in its fires. Even the faith of the principal
personages of the kingdom was inquired into, and, at different times,
proceedings, sufficient, at least, to assert its authority, were
instituted in relation to Don John of Austria, and the formidable Duke
of Alva;[750] proceedings, however, which must be regarded rather as
matters of show than of substance, since the whole institution was
connected with the government from the first, and became more and more
subservient to the policy of the successive masters of the state, as
its tendencies were developed in successive reigns.
[750] Llorente, Tom. II., Chap. XIX., XXV., and other places.
The great purpose, therefore, of the government and the Inquisition
may be considered as having been fulfilled in the latter part of the
reign of Philip the Second,--farther, at least, than such a purpose
was ever fulfilled in any other Christian country, and farther than it
is ever likely to be again fulfilled elsewhere. The Spanish nation was
then become, in the sense they themselves gave to the term, the most
thoroughly religious nation in Europe; a fact signally illustrated in
their own eyes a few years afterward, when it was deemed desirable
to expel the remains of the Moorish race from the Peninsula, and
six hundred thousand peaceable and industrious subjects were, from
religious bigotry, cruelly driven out of their native country, amidst
the devout exultation of the whole kingdom,--Cervantes, Lope de Vega,
and others of the principal men of genius then alive, joining in the
general jubilee.[751] From this time, the voice of religious dissent
can hardly be said to have been heard in the land; and the Inquisition,
therefore, down to its overthrow in 1808, was chiefly a political
engine, much occupied about cases connected with the policy of the
state, though under the pretence that they were cases of heresy or
unbelief. The great body of the Spanish people rejoiced alike in their
loyalty and their orthodoxy; and the few who differed in faith from
the mass of their fellow-subjects were either held in silence by their
fears, or else sunk away from the surface of society the moment their
disaffection was suspected.
[751] See note to Chap. XL. of this Part.
The results of such extraordinary traits in the national character
could not fail to be impressed upon the literature of any country, and
particularly upon a literature which, like that of Spain, had always
been strongly marked by the popular temperament and peculiarities. But
the period was not one in which such traits could be produced with
poetical effect. The ancient loyalty, which had once been so generous
an element in the Spanish character and cultivation, was now infected
with the ambition of universal empire, and was lavished upon princes
and nobles who, like the later Philips and their ministers, were
unworthy of its homage; so that, in the Spanish historians and epic
poets of this period, and even in more popular writers, like Quevedo
and Calderon, we find a vainglorious admiration of their country, and a
poor flattery of royalty and rank, that remind us of the old Castilian
pride and deference only by showing how both had lost their dignity.
And so it is with the ancient religious feeling that was so nearly
akin to this loyalty. The Christian spirit, which gave an air of duty
to the wildest forms of adventure throughout the country, during its
long contest with the power of misbelief, was now fallen away into a
low and anxious bigotry, fierce and intolerant towards every thing that
differed from its own sharply defined faith, and yet so pervading and
so popular, that the romances and tales of the time are full of it, and
the national theatre, in more than one form, becomes its strange and
grotesque monument.
Of course, the body of Spanish poetry and eloquent prose produced
during this interval--the earlier part of which was the period of
the greatest glory Spain ever enjoyed--was injuriously affected by
so diseased a condition of the national character. That generous and
manly spirit which is the breath of intellectual life to any people
was restrained and stifled. Some departments of literature, such as
forensic eloquence and eloquence of the pulpit, satirical poetry, and
elegant didactic prose, hardly appeared at all; others, like epic
poetry, were strangely perverted and misdirected; while yet others,
like the drama, the ballads, and the lighter forms of lyrical verse,
seemed to grow exuberant and lawless, from the very restraints imposed
on the rest; restraints which, in fact, forced poetical genius into
channels where it would otherwise have flowed much more scantily and
with much less luxuriant results.
The books that were published during the whole period on which we are
now entering, and indeed for a century later, bore everywhere marks
of the subjection to which the press and those who wrote for it were
alike reduced. From the abject title-pages and dedications of the
authors themselves, through the crowd of certificates collected from
their friends to establish the orthodoxy of works that were often as
little connected with religion as fairy tales, down to the colophon,
supplicating pardon for any unconscious neglect of the authority of the
Church or any too free use of classical mythology, we are continually
oppressed with painful proofs, not only how completely the human mind
was enslaved in Spain, but how grievously it had become cramped and
crippled by the chains it had so long worn.
But we shall be greatly in error, if, as we notice these deep marks
and strange peculiarities in Spanish literature, we suppose they were
produced by the direct action either of the Inquisition or of the
civil government of the country, compressing, as if with a physical
power, the whole circle of society. This would have been impossible.
No nation would have submitted to it; much less so high-spirited and
chivalrous a nation as the Spanish in the reign of Charles the Fifth
and in the greater part of that of Philip the Second. This dark work
was done earlier. Its foundations were laid deep and sure in the old
Castilian character. It was the result of the excess and misdirection
of that very Christian zeal which fought so fervently and gloriously
against the intrusion of Mohammedanism into Europe, and of that
military loyalty which sustained the Spanish princes so faithfully
through the whole of that terrible contest;--both of them high and
ennobling principles, which in Spain were more wrought into the popular
character than they ever were in any other country.
Spanish submission to an unworthy despotism, and Spanish bigotry, were,
therefore, not the results of the Inquisition and the modern appliances
of a corrupting monarchy; but the Inquisition and the despotism were
rather the results of a misdirection of the old religious faith and
loyalty. The civilization that recognized such elements presented, no
doubt, much that was brilliant, picturesque, and ennobling; but it was
not without its darker side; for it failed to excite and cherish many
of the most elevating qualities of our common nature,--those qualities
which are produced in domestic life, and result in the cultivation of
the arts of peace.
As we proceed, therefore, we shall find, in the full development of the
Spanish character and literature, seeming contradictions, which can
be reconciled only by looking back to the foundations on which they
both rest. We shall find the Inquisition at the height of its power,
and a free and immoral drama at the height of its popularity,--Philip
the Second and his two immediate successors governing the country with
the severest and most jealous despotism, while Quevedo was writing his
witty and dangerous satires, and Cervantes his genial and wise Don
Quixote. But the more carefully we consider such a state of things, the
more we shall see that these are moral contradictions which draw after
them grave moral mischiefs. The Spanish nation, and the men of genius
who illustrated its best days, might be light-hearted because they did
not perceive the limits within which they were confined, or did not,
for a time, feel the restraints that were imposed upon them. What they
gave up might be given up with cheerful hearts, and not with a sense
of discouragement and degradation; it might be done in the spirit of
loyalty and with the fervor of religious zeal; but it is not at all the
less true that the hard limits were there, and that great sacrifices of
the best elements of the national character must follow.
Of this time gave abundant proof. Only a little more than a century
elapsed before the government that had threatened the world with
a universal empire was hardly able to repel invasion from abroad,
or maintain the allegiance of its own subjects at home. Life--the
vigorous, poetical life which had been kindled through the country in
its ages of trial and adversity--was evidently passing out of the whole
Spanish character. As a people, they sunk away from being a first-rate
power in Europe, till they became one of altogether inferior importance
and consideration; and then, drawing back haughtily behind their
mountains, rejected all equal intercourse with the rest of the world,
in a spirit almost as exclusive and intolerant as that in which they
had formerly refused intercourse with their Arab conquerors. The crude
and gross wealth poured in from their American possessions sustained,
indeed, for yet another century the forms of a miserable political
existence in their government; but the earnest faith, the loyalty,
the dignity of the Spanish people were gone; and little remained in
their place, but a weak subserviency to the unworthy masters of the
state, and a low, timid bigotry in whatever related to religion. The
old enthusiasm, rarely directed by wisdom from the first, and often
misdirected afterwards, faded away; and the poetry of the country,
which had always depended more on the state of the popular feeling than
any other poetry of modern times, faded and failed with it.
CHAPTER II.
LOW STATE OF LETTERS ABOUT THE YEAR 1500.--INFLUENCE OF ITALY.--
CONQUESTS OF CHARLES THE FIFTH.--BOSCAN.--NAVAGIERO.--ITALIAN FORMS
INTRODUCED INTO SPANISH POETRY.--GARCILASSO DE LA VEGA.--HIS LIFE,
WORKS, AND PERMANENT INFLUENCE.
There was, no doubt, a great decay of letters and good taste in Spain
during the latter part of the troubled reign of John the Second and
the whole of the still more disturbed period when his successor, Henry
the Fourth, sat upon the throne of Castile. The Provençal school had
passed away, and its imitations in Castilian had not been successful.
The earlier Italian influences, less fertile in good results than
might have been anticipated, were almost forgotten. The fashion of the
court, therefore, in the absence of better or more powerful impulses,
ruled over every thing, and a monotonous poetry, full of conceits and
artifices, was all that its own artificial character could produce.
Nor was there much improvement in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella.
The introduction of the art of printing and the revival of a regard
for classical antiquity were, indeed, foundations for a national
culture such as had not before been laid; while, at the same time, the
establishment of the University of Alcalá, by Cardinal Ximenes, and
the revival of that of Salamanca, with the labors of such scholars
as Peter Martyr, Lucio Marineo, Antonio de Lebrija, and Arias
Barbosa, could hardly fail to exercise a favorable influence on the
intellectual cultivation, if not on the poetical taste, of the country.
Occasionally, as we have seen, proofs of the old energy appeared in
such works as the “Celestina” and the “Coplas” of Manrique. The old
ballads, too, and the other forms of the early popular poetry, no
doubt, maintained their place in the hearts of the common people. But
it is not to be concealed, that, among the cultivated classes,--as the
Cancioneros and nearly every thing else that came from the press in the
time of Ferdinand and Isabella sufficiently prove,--taste was at a very
low ebb.
The first impulse to a better state of things came from Italy. In some
respects this was unhappy; but there can be little doubt that it was
inevitable. The intercourse between Italy and Spain, shortly before the
accession of Charles the Fifth, had been much increased, chiefly by the
conquest of Naples, but partly by other causes. Regular interchanges
of ambassadors took place between the See of Rome and the court of
Ferdinand and Isabella, and one of them was a son of the poetical
Marquis of Santillana, and another the father of Garcilasso de la Vega.
The universities of Italy continued to receive large numbers of Spanish
students, who still regarded the means of a generous education at home
as inadequate to their wants; and Spanish poets, among whom were Juan
de la Enzina and Torres Naharro, resorted there freely, and lived with
consideration at Rome and Naples. In the latter city, the old Spanish
family of Dávalos--one of whom was the husband of that Vittoria Colonna
whose poetry ranks with the Italian classics--were among the chief
patrons of letters during their time, and kept alive an intellectual
union between the two countries, by which they were equally claimed
and on which they reflected equal honor.[752]
[752] Ginguené, Hist. Lit. d’ltalie, Paris, 1812, 8vo, Tom. IV.
pp. 87-90; and more fully in Historia de Don Hernando Dávalos,
Marques de Pescara, en Anvers, Juan Steelsio, 1558, 12mo;--a
curious book, which seems, I think, to have been written before
1546, and was the work of Pedro Valles, an Aragonese. Latassa,
Bib. Nueva de Escritores Aragoneses, Zaragossa, Tom. I. 4to,
1798, p. 289.
But besides these individual instances of connection between Spain
and Italy, the gravest events were now drawing together the greater
interests of the mass of the people in both countries, and fastening
their thoughts intently upon each other. Naples, after the treaty of
1503 and the brilliant successes of Gonzalvo de Córdova, was delivered
over to Spain, bound hand and foot, and was governed, above a century,
by a succession of Spanish viceroys, each accompanied by a train of
Spanish officers and dependants, among whom, not unfrequently, we
find men of letters and poets, like the Argensolas and Quevedo. When
Charles the Fifth ascended the throne, in 1516, it was apparent that
he would at once make an effort to extend his political and military
power throughout Italy. The tempting plains of Lombardy became,
therefore, the theatre of the first great European contest entered
into by Spain,--a grand arena, in which, as it proved, much of the
fate of Europe, as well as of Italy, was to be decided by two young
and passionate monarchs, burning with personal rivalship and the love
of glory. In this way, from 1522, when the first war broke out between
Francis the First and Charles the Fifth, to the disastrous battle of
Pavia, in 1525, we may consider the whole disposable force of Spain to
have been transferred to Italy, and subjected, in a remarkable degree,
to the influences of Italian culture and civilization.
Nor did the connection between the two countries stop here. In 1527,
Rome itself was, for a moment, added to the conquests of the Spanish
crown, and the Pope became the prisoner of the Emperor, as the king
of France had been before. In 1530, Charles appeared again in Italy,
surrounded by a splendid Spanish court, and at the head of a military
power that left no doubt of his mastery. He at once crushed the
liberties of Florence and restored the aristocracy of the Medici. He
made peace with the outraged Pope. By his wisdom and moderation, he
confirmed his friendly relations with the other states of Italy; and,
as the seal of all his successes, he caused himself, in the presence of
whatever was most august in both countries, to be solemnly crowned King
of Lombardy and Emperor of the Romans, by the same Pope whom, three
years before, he had counted among his captives.[753] Such a state of
things necessarily implied a most intimate connection between Spain and
Italy; and this connection was maintained down to the abdication of the
Emperor, in 1555, and, indeed, long afterwards.[754]
[753] The coronation of Charles V. at Bologna, like most of the
other striking events in Spanish history, was brought upon the
Spanish theatre. It is circumstantially represented in “Los dos
Monarcas de Europa,” by Bartolomé de Salazar y Luna. (Comedias
Escogidas, Madrid, 1665, 4to, Tomo XXII.) But the play is quite
too extravagant in its claims, both as respects the Emperor’s
humiliation and the Pope’s glory, considering that Clement VII.
had so lately been the Emperor’s prisoner. As the ceremony is
about to begin, a procession of priests enters, chanting,--
In happy hour, let this child of the Church,
Her obedient, dutiful son,
Come forth to receive, with her holiest rites,
The crown which his valor has won.
To which the Emperor is made to reply,--
And in happy hour, let _him_ show his power,
His dominion, and glorious might,
Who now sees, in the dust, a king faithful and just
Surrender, rejoicing, his right.
But such things were common in Spain, and tended to conciliate
the favor of the clergy for the theatre.
[754] P. de Sandoval, Hist. del Emperador Carlos V., Amberes,
1681, folio, Lib. XII. to XVIII., but especially the last book.
On the other hand, it should be remembered that Italy was now in a
condition to act with all the power of a superior civilization and
refinement on this large body of Spaniards, many of them the leading
spirits of the Empire, who, by successive wars and negotiations, were
thus kept for half a century travelling in Italy and living at Genoa,
Milan, and Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. The age of Lorenzo de’
Medici was already past, leaving behind it the memorials of Poliziano,
Boiardo, Pulci, and Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Leo the Tenth and
Clement the Seventh was contemporary, and had brought with it the yet
more prevalent influences of Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian, of
Machiavelli, of Berni, of Ariosto, of Bembo, and of Sannazaro; the last
of whom, it is not unworthy of notice, was himself a descendant of one
of those very Spanish families whom the political interests of the two
countries had originally carried to Naples. It was, therefore, when
Rome and Naples, Florence and the North of Italy, were in the maturity
of their glory, as seats of the arts and letters, that no small part
of what was most noble and cultivated in Spain was led across the Alps
and awakened to a perception of such forms and creations of genius and
taste as had not been attempted beyond the Pyrenees, and such as could
not fail to produce their full effect on minds excited, like those
of the whole Spanish people, by the glorious results of their long
struggle against the Moors, and their present magnificent successes
both in America and Europe.
Visible traces of the influence of Italian literature might, therefore,
from general causes, soon be looked for in the Spanish; but an accident
brings them to our notice somewhat earlier, perhaps, than might
have been anticipated. Juan Boscan, a patrician of Barcelona, was,
as he himself tells us, devoted to poetry from his youth. The city
to which he belonged had early been distinguished for the number of
Provençal and Catalonian Troubadours who had flourished in it. But
Boscan preferred to write in the Castilian; and his defection from his
native dialect became, in some sort, the seal of its fate. His earlier
efforts, a few of which remain to us, are in the style of the preceding
century; but at last, when, from the most distinct accounts we can
obtain, he was about twenty-five years old, and when, we are assured,
he had been received at court, had served in the army, and had visited
foreign countries, he was induced, by an accident, to attempt the
proper Italian measures, as they were then practised.[755]
[755] The Dictionary of Torres y Amat contains a short, but
sufficient, life of Boscan; and in Sedano, “Parnaso Español,”
(Madrid, 1768-78, 12mo, Tom. VIII. p. xxxi.,) there is one
somewhat more ample.
He became, at that period, acquainted with Andrea Navagiero, who
was sent, in 1524, as ambassador from Venice to Charles the Fifth,
and returned home in 1528, carrying with him a dry, but valuable,
itinerary, which was afterwards published as an account of his travels.
He was a man of learning and a poet, an orator and a statesman of no
mean name.[756] While in Spain, he spent, during the year 1526, six
months at Granada.[757] “Being with Navagiero there one day,” says
Boscan, “and discoursing with him about matters of wit and letters, and
especially about the different forms they take in different languages,
he asked me why I did not make an experiment in Castilian of sonnets
and the other forms of verse used by good Italian authors; and not
only spoke to me of it thus slightly, but urged me much to do it. A
few days afterwards, I set off for my own home; and whether it were
the length and solitariness of the way I know not, but, turning over
different things in my mind, I came often back upon what Navagiero had
said to me. And thus I began to try this kind of verse. At first, I
found it somewhat difficult; for it is of a very artful construction,
and in many particulars different from ours. But afterwards it seemed
to me,--perhaps from the love we naturally bear to what is our
own,--that I began to succeed very well, and so I went on, little by
little, with increasing zeal.”[758]
[756] Tiraboschi, Storia della Lett. Italiana, Roma, 1784, 4to,
Tom. VII., Parte I. p. 242; Parte II. p. 294; and Parte III. pp.
228-230.
[757] Andrea Navagiero, Il Viaggio fatto in Spagna, etc.,
Vinegia, 1563, 12mo, ff. 18-30. Bayle gives an article on
Navagiero’s life, with discriminating praise of his scholarship
and genius.
[758] Letter to the Duquesa de Soma, prefixed to the Second Book
of Boscan’s Poems.
This account is interesting and important. It is rare that any
one individual has been able to exercise such an influence on the
literature of a foreign nation as was exercised by Navagiero. It is
still more rare,--indeed, perhaps, wholly unknown, in any case where
it may have occurred,--that the precise mode in which it was exercised
can be so exactly explained. Boscan tells us not only what he did, but
what led him to do it, and how he began his work, which we find him,
from this moment, following up, till he devoted himself to it entirely,
and wrote in all the favorite Italian measures and forms with boldness
and success. He was resisted, but he tells us Garcilasso sustained him;
and from this small beginning in a slight conversation with Navagiero
at Granada, a new school was introduced into Spanish poetry, which has
prevailed in it ever since, and materially influenced its character and
destinies.
Boscan felt his success. This we can see from his own account of it.
But he made little effort to press his example on others; for he was a
man of fortune and consideration, who led a happy life with his family
at Barcelona, and hardly cared for popular reputation or influence.
Occasionally, we are told, he was seen at court; and at one period he
had some charge of the education of that Duke of Alva whose name, in
the next reign, became so formidable. But in general he preferred a
life of retirement to any of the prizes offered to ambition.
Letters were his amusement. “In what I have written,” he says, “the
mere writing was never my object; but rather to solace such faculties
as I have, and to go less heavily through certain heavy passages of
my life.”[759] The range of his studies, however, was wider than this
remark might seem to imply, and wider than was common in Spain at the
beginning of the sixteenth century, even among scholars. He translated
a tragedy of Euripides, which was licensed to be published, but which
never appeared in print, and is, no doubt, lost.[760] On the basis of
the “Hero and Leander” of Musæus, and following the example of Bernardo
Tasso, he wrote, in the _versi sciolti_, or blank verse, of the
Italians, a tale nearly three thousand lines long, which may still be
read with pleasure, for the gentle and sweet passages it contains.[761]
And in general, throughout his poetry, he shows that he was familiar
with the Greek and Latin classics, and imbued, to a considerable
degree, with the spirit of antiquity.
[759] Letter to the Duquesa de Soma.
[760] It is mentioned in the permission to publish his works
granted to Boscan’s widow, by Charles V., Feb. 18, 1543, and
prefixed to the very rare and important edition of his works
and those of his friend Garcilasso, published for the first
time in the same year, at Barcelona, by Amoros; a small 4to,
containing 237 leaves. This edition is said to have been at once
counterfeited, and was certainly reprinted not less than six
times as early as 1546, three years after its first appearance.
In 1553, Alonso de Ulloa, a Spaniard, at Venice, who published
many Spanish books there with prefaces of some value by himself,
printed it in 18mo, very neatly, and added a few poems to those
found in the first edition; particularly one, at the beginning
of the volume, entitled “Conversion de Boscan,” religious in its
subject, and national in its form. At the end Ulloa puts a few
pages of verse, attacking the Italian forms adopted by Boscan;
describing what he thus adds as by “an uncertain author.” They
are, however, the work of Castillejo, and are found in Obras de
Castillejo, Anvers, 1598, 18mo, f. 110, etc.
[761] Góngora, in the first two of his Burlesque Ballads, has
made himself merry (Obras, Madrid, 1654, 4to, f. 104, etc.) at
the expense of Boscan’s “Leandro.” But he has taken the same
freedom with better things.
The Leandro was, I think, the first attempt to introduce blank
verse, which was thus brought by Boscan into the poetry of Spain
in 1543, as it was a little later into English, from the _versi
sciolti_ of the Italians, by Surrey, who called it “a strange
meter.” Acuña soon followed in Castilian with other examples of
it; but the first really good Spanish blank verse known to me is
to be found in the eclogue of “Tirsi” by Francisco de Figueroa,
written about half a century after the time of Boscan, and not
printed till 1626. The translation of a part of the Odyssey
by Perez, in 1553, and the “Sagrada Eratos” of Alonso Carillo
Laso de la Vega, which is a paraphrase of the Psalms, printed
at Naples in 1657, folio, afford much longer specimens that are
generally respectable. But the full rhyme is so easy in Spanish,
and the _asonante_ is so much easier, that blank verse, though it
has been used from the middle of the sixteenth century, has been
little cultivated or favored.
His longest work was a translation of the Italian “Courtier” of
Balthazar Castiglione,--the best book on good-breeding, as Dr.
Johnson thought two centuries afterwards, that was ever written.[762]
Boscan, however, frankly says, that he did not like the business of
translating, which he regarded as “a low vanity, beseeming men of
little knowledge”; but Garcilasso de la Vega had sent him a copy of
the original soon after it was published, and he made this Spanish
version of it, he tells us, “at his friend’s earnest request.”[763]
Either or both of them may have known its author in the same way Boscan
knew Navagiero; for Castiglione was sent as ambassador of Clement the
Seventh to Spain in 1525, and remained there till his death, which
happened at Toledo, in 1529.
[762] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. Croker, London, 1831, 8vo,
Tom. II. p. 501.
[763] The first edition of it is in black letter, without the
name of place or printer, 4to, 140 leaves, and is dated 1549.
Another edition appeared as early as 1553; supposed by Antonio
to have been the oldest. It is on the Index of 1667, p. 245, for
expurgation.
But however this may have been, the Italian original of the Courtier
was prepared for the press in Spain and first printed in 1528;[764]
soon after which Boscan must have made his translation, though it did
not appear till 1540. As a version, it does not profess to be very
strict, for Boscan says he thought an exact fidelity to be unworthy of
him;[765] but, as a Spanish composition, it is uncommonly flowing and
easy. Garcilasso declares that it reads like an original work;[766]
and Morales, the historian, says, “The Courtier discourseth not better
in Italy, where he was born, than here in Spain, where Boscan hath
exhibited him so admirably well.”[767] Perhaps nothing in Castilian
prose, of an earlier date, is written in so classical and finished a
style as this translation by Boscan.
[764] Ginguené, Hist. Lit. d’Italie, Tom. VII. pp. 544, 550.
[765] “I have no mind,” he says in the Prólogo, “to be so strict
in the translation of this book, as to confine myself to give it
word for word. On the contrary, if any thing occurs, which sounds
well in the original language, and ill in our own, I shall not
fail to change it or to suppress it.” Ed. 1549, f. 2.
[766] “Every time I read it,” says Garcilasso in a letter to Doña
Gerónima Palova de Almogovar, prefixed to the first edition,
“it seems to me as if it had never been written in any other
language.” This letter of Garcilasso is very beautiful in point
of style.
[767] Morales, Discourse on the Castilian Language, Obras de
Oliva, Madrid, 1787, 12mo, Tom. I. p. xli.
With such occupations Boscan filled up his unostentatious life. He
published nothing, or very little, and we have no single date to record
concerning him. But, from the few facts that can be collected, it seems
probable he was born before 1500, and we know that he died as early
as 1543; for in that year his works were published at Barcelona, by
his widow, under a license from the Emperor Charles the Fifth, with a
Preface, in which she says her husband had partly prepared them for the
press, because he feared they would be printed from some of the many
imperfect copies that had gone into circulation without his consent.
They are divided into four books. The first consists of a small number
of poems in what are called _coplas Españolas_, or what he himself
elsewhere terms “the Castilian manner.” These are his early efforts,
made before his acquaintance with Navagiero. They are _villancicos_,
_canciones_, and _coplas_, in the short national verses, and seem as
if they might have come out of the old Cancioneros, in which, indeed,
two of them are to be found.[768] Their merit is not great; but, amidst
their ingenious conceits, there is sometimes a happiness and grace of
expression rarely granted to the poets of the same school in that or
the preceding century.
[768] Cancionero General, 1535, f. 153.
The second and third books, constituting by far the larger part of
the volume, are composed entirely of poems in the Italian measure.
They consist of ninety-three sonnets and nine _canzones_; the long
poem on Hero and Leander, in blank verse, already mentioned; an elegy
and two didactic epistles, in _terza rima_; and a half-narrative,
half-allegorical poem, in one hundred and thirty-five octave stanzas.
It is not necessary to go beyond such a mere enumeration of the
contents of these two books to learn, that, at least so far as their
forms are concerned, they have nothing to do with the elder national
Castilian poetry. The sonnets and the _canzones_ especially are obvious
imitations of Petrarch, as we can see in the case of the two beginning,
“Gentil Señora mia,” and “Claros y frescos rios,” which are largely
indebted to two of the most beautiful and best-known _canzones_ of the
lover of Laura.[769] In most of these poems, however, and amidst a good
deal of hardness of manner, a Spanish tone and spirit are perceptible,
which rescue them, in a great degree, from the imputation of being
copies. Boscan’s colors are here laid on with a bolder hand than
those of his Italian master, and there is an absence of that delicate
and exact finish, both in language and style, which, however charming
in his models, would hardly be possible in the most skilful Spanish
imitations.
[769] Petrarca, Vita di Madonna Laura, Canz. 9 and 14. But
Boscan’s imitations of them are marred by a good many conceits.
Some of his sonnets, however, are free from this fault, and are
natural and tender.
The elegy, which is merely entitled “Capitolo,” has more conceits
and learning in it than become its subject, and approaches nearer to
Boscan’s first manner than any of his later poems. It is addressed
to his lady-love; but, notwithstanding its defects, it contains long
passages of tenderness and simple beauty that will always be read with
pleasure. Of the two epistles, the first is poor and affected; but that
addressed to the old statesman, poet, and soldier, Diego de Mendoza,
is much in the tone and manner of Horace,--acute, genial, and full of
philosophy.
But the most agreeable and original of Boscan’s works is the last of
them all,--“The Allegory.” It opens with a gorgeous description of
the Court of Love, and with the truly Spanish idea of a corresponding
and opposing Court of Jealousy; but almost the whole of the rest
consists of an account of the embassy of two messengers from the first
of these courts to two ladies of Barcelona who had refused to come
beneath its empire, and to persuade whom to submission a speech of
the ambassador is given that fills nearly half the poem, and ends it
somewhat abruptly. No doubt, the whole was intended as a compliment
to the two ladies, in which the story is of little consequence. But
it is a pleasing and airy trifle, in which its author has sometimes
happily hit the tone of Ariosto, and at other times reminds us of the
Island of Love in the “Lusiad,” though Boscan preceded Camoens by many
years. Occasionally, too, he has a moral delicacy, more refined than
Petrarch’s, though perhaps suggested by that of the great Italian;
such a delicacy as he shows in the following stanza, and two or three
preceding and following it, in which the ambassador of Love exhorts the
two ladies of Barcelona to submit to his authority, by urging on them
the happiness of a union founded in a genuine sympathy of tastes and
feeling:--
For is it not a happiness most pure,
That two fond hearts can thus together melt,
And each the other’s sorrows all endure,
While still their joys as those of one are felt;
Even causeless anger of support secure,
And pardons causeless in one spirit dealt;
That so their loves, though fickle all and strange,
May, in their thousand changes, still together change?[770]
[770]
Y no es gusto tambien assi entenderos,
Que podays siēpre entrambos conformaros:
Entrambos en un punto entrísteceros,
Y en otro punto entrambos alegraros:
Y juntos sin razon embraueceros,
Y sin razon tambien luego amanssaros:
Y que os hagan, en fin, vuestros amores
Igualmente mudar de mil colores?
Obras de Boscan, Barcelona, 1543, 4to, f. clx.
Boscan might, probably, have done more for the literature of his
country than he did. His poetical talents were not, indeed, of the
highest order; but he perceived the degradation into which Spanish
poetry had fallen, and was persuaded that the way to raise it again was
to give it an ideal character and classical forms such as it had not
yet known. But to accomplish this, he adopted a standard not formed
on the intimations of the national genius. He took for his models
foreign masters, who, though more advanced than any he could find at
home, were yet entitled to supremacy in no literature but their own,
and could never constitute a safe foundation whereon to build a great
and permanent school of Spanish poetry. Entire success, therefore,
was impossible to him. He was able to establish in Spain the Italian
eleven-syllable and iambic versification; the sonnet and _canzone_,
as settled by Petrarch; Dante’s _terza rima_;[771] and Boccaccio’s and
Ariosto’s flowing octaves;--all in better taste than any thing among
the poets of his time and country, and all of them important additions
to the forms of verse before known in Spain. But he could go no
farther. The original and essential spirit of Italian poetry could no
more be transplanted to Castile or Catalonia than to Germany or England.
[771] Pedro Fernandez de Villegas, Archdeacon of Burgos, who, in
1515, published a translation of the “Inferno” of Dante, (see
_ante_, p. 409, n.,) says, in his Introduction, that he at first
endeavoured to make his version in _terza rima_, “which manner of
writing,” he goes on, “is not in use among us, and appeared to me
so ungraceful, that I gave it up.” This was about fifteen years
before Boscan wrote in it with success; perhaps a little earlier,
for it is dedicated to Doña Juana de Aragon, the natural daughter
of Ferdinand the Catholic, a lady of much literary cultivation,
who died before it was completed.
But whatever were his purposes and plans for the advancement of the
literature of his country, Boscan lived long enough to see them
fulfilled, so far as they were ever destined to be; for he had a friend
who cooperated with him in all of them from the first, and who, with
a happier genius, easily surpassed him, and carried the best forms of
Italian verse to a height they never afterwards reached in Spanish
poetry. This friend was Garcilasso de la Vega, who yet died so young,
that Boscan survived him several years.
Garcilasso was descended from an ancient family in the North of Spain,
who traced back their ancestry to the age of the Cid, and who, from
century to century, had been distinguished by holding some of the
highest places in the government of Castile.[772] A poetical tradition
says, that one of his forefathers obtained the name of “Vega” or
Plain, and the motto of “Ave Maria” for his family arms, from the
circumstance, that, during one of the sieges of Granada, he slew
outright, before the face of both armies, a Moorish champion who had
publicly insulted the Christian faith by dragging a banner inscribed
with “Ave Maria” at his horse’s heels,--a tradition faithfully
preserved in a fine old ballad, and forming the catastrophe of one
of Lope de Vega’s plays.[773] But whether all this be true or not,
Garcilasso bore a name honored on both sides of his house; for his
mother was daughter and sole heir of Fernan Perez de Guzman, and
his father was the ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns at Rome in
relation to the troublesome affairs of Naples.
[772] The best life of Garcilasso de la Vega is to be found
in the edition of his works, Sevilla, 1580, 8vo, by Fernando
de Herrera, the poet. A play, comprising no small part of his
adventures, was produced in the Madrid theatre, by Don Gregorio
Romero y Larrañaga, in 1840.
[773] The story and the ballad are found in Hita, “Guerras
Civiles de Granada,” (Barcelona, 1737, 12mo, Tom. I. cap. 17,)
and in Lope de Vega’s “Cerco de Santa Fe” (Comedias, Tom. I.,
Valladolid, 1604, 4to). But the tradition, I think, is not true.
Oviedo directly contradicts it, when giving an account of the
family of the poet’s father; and as he knew them, his authority
is perhaps decisive. (Quinquagenas, Batalla I. Quin. iii.
Diálogo 43, MS.) But, besides this, Lord Holland (Life of Lope,
London, 1817, 8vo, Vol. I. p. 2) gives good reasons against the
authenticity of the story, which Wiffen (Works of Garcilasso,
London, 1823, 8vo, pp. 100 and 384) answers as well as he can,
but not effectually. It is really a pity it cannot be made out to
be true, it is so poetically appropriate.
He was born at Toledo in 1503, and was educated there till he reached
an age suitable for bearing arms. Then, as became his rank and
pretensions, he was sent to court, and received his place in the armies
that were already gaining so much glory for their country. When he was
about twenty-seven years old, he married an Aragonese lady attached
to the court of Eleanor, widow of the king of Portugal, who, in 1530,
was in Spain on her way to become queen of France. From this time
he seems to have been constantly in the wars which the Emperor was
carrying on in all directions, and to have been much trusted by him,
though his elder brother, Pedro, had been implicated in the troubles
of the _Comunidades_, and compelled to escape from Spain as an outlawed
rebel.[774]
[774] Sandoval, Hist. del Emperador Carlos V., Lib. V., and Oviedo
in the Dialogue referred to in the last note.
In 1532 Garcilasso was at Vienna, and among those who distinguished
themselves in the defeat of the Turkish expedition of Soliman, which
that great sultan pushed to the very gates of the city. But while
he was there, he was himself involved in trouble. He undertook to
promote the marriage of one of his nephews with a lady of the Imperial
household; and, urging his project against the pleasure of the Empress,
not only failed, but was cast into prison on an island in the Danube,
where he wrote the melancholy lines on his own desolation and on the
beauty of the adjacent country, which pass as the third _Cancion_ in
his works.[775] The progress of events, however, not only soon brought
his release, but raised him into higher favor than ever. In 1535 he was
at the siege of Tunis,--when Charles the Fifth attempted to crush the
Barbary powers by a single blow,--and there received two severe wounds,
one on his head and the other in his arm.[776] His return to Spain is
recorded in an elegy, written at the foot of Mount Ætna, and indicating
that he came back by the way of Naples; a city which, from another poem
addressed to Boscan, he seems to have visited once before.[777] At any
rate, we know, though his present visit to Italy was a short one, that
he was there, at some period, long enough to win the personal esteem
and regard of Bembo and Tansillo.[778]
[775] Obras de Garcilasso, ed. Herrera, 1580, p. 234, and also p.
239, note.
[776] Soneto 33 and note, ed. Herrera.
[777] Elegía II. and the Epístola, ed. Herrera, p. 378.
[778] Obras, ed. Herrera, p. 18.
The very next year, however,--the last of his short life,--we find
him again at the court of the Emperor, and engaged in the disastrous
expedition into Provence. The army had already passed through the
difficulties and dangers of the siege of Marseilles, and was fortunate
enough not to be pursued by the cautious Constable de Montmorenci.
But as they approached the town of Frejus, a small castle, on a
commanding hill, defended by only fifty of the neighbouring peasantry,
offered a serious annoyance to their farther passage. The Emperor
ordered the slight obstacle to be swept from his path. Garcilasso,
who had now a considerable command, advanced gladly to execute the
Imperial requisition. He knew that the eyes of the Emperor, and indeed
those of the whole army, were upon him; and, in the true spirit of
knighthood, he was the first to mount the wall. But a well-directed
stone precipitated him into the ditch beneath. The wound, which was on
his head, proved mortal, and he died a few days afterwards, at Nice,
in 1536, only thirty-three years old. His fate is recorded by Mariana,
Sandoval, and the other national historians, among the important events
of the time; and the Emperor, we are told, basely avenged it by putting
to death all the survivors of the fifty peasantry, who had done no more
than bravely defend their homes against a foreign invader.[779]
[779] Obras, ed. Herrera, p. 15. Sandoval, Hist. de Carlos V.,
Lib. XXIII. § 12, and Mariana, Historia, ad annum. Çapata, in
his “Carlos Famoso,” (Valencia, 1565, 4to, Canto 41,) states
the number of the peasants in the tower at thirteen; and says
that Don Luis de la Cueva, who executed the Imperial order for
their death, wished to save all but one or two. He adds, that
Garcilasso was without armour when he scaled the wall of the
tower, and that his friends endeavoured to prevent his rashness.
In a life so short and so crowded with cares and adventures we should
hardly expect to find leisure for poetry. But, as he describes himself
in his third Eclogue, Garcilasso seems to have hurried through the
world,
Now seizing on the sword, and now the pen;[780]
[780]
Tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma;
a verse afterwards borrowed by Ercilla, and used in his
“Araucana.” It is equally applicable to both poets.
so that he still left a small collection of poems, which the faithful
widow of Boscan, finding among her husband’s papers, published at
the end of his works as a Fourth Book, and has thus rescued what
would otherwise probably have been lost. Their character is singular,
considering the circumstances under which they were written; for,
instead of betraying any of the spirit that governed the main course
of their author’s adventurous life and brought him to an early grave,
they are remarkable for their gentleness and melancholy, and their
best portions are in a pastoral tone breathing the very sweetness of
the fabulous ages of Arcadia. When he wrote most of them we have no
means of determining with exactness. But with the exception of three
or four trifles that appear mingled with other similar trifles in the
first book of Boscan’s works, all Garcilasso’s poems are in the Italian
forms, which we know were first adopted, with his coöperation, in 1526;
so that we must, at any rate, place them in the ten years between this
date and that of his death.
They consist of thirty-seven sonnets, five _canzones_, two elegies,
an epistle in _versi sciolti_ less grave than the rest of his poetry,
and three pastorals; the pastorals constituting more than half of all
the verse he wrote. The air of the whole is Italian. He has imitated
Petrarch, Bembo, Ariosto, and especially Sannazaro, to whom he has
once or twice been indebted for pages together; turning, however, from
time to time, reverently to the greater ancient masters, Virgil and
Theocritus, and acknowledging their supremacy. Where the Italian tone
most prevails, something of the poetical spirit which should sustain
him is lost. But, after all, Garcilasso was a poet of no common genius.
We see it sometimes even in the strictest of his imitations; but it
reveals itself much more distinctly when, as in the first Eclogue, he
uses as servants the masters to whom he elsewhere devotes himself, and
writes only like a Spaniard, warm with the peculiar national spirit of
his country.
This first Eclogue is, in truth, the best of his works. It is
beautiful in the simplicity of its structure, and beautiful in its
poetical execution. It was probably written at Naples. It opens with
an address to the father of the famous Duke of Alva, then viceroy of
that principality, calling upon him, in the most artless manner, to
listen to the complaints of two shepherds, the first mourning the
faithlessness of a mistress, and the other the death of one. Salicio,
who represents Garcilasso, then begins; and when he has entirely
finished, but not before, he is answered by Nemoroso, whose name
indicates that he represents Boscan.[781] The whole closes naturally
and gracefully with a description of the approach of evening. It is,
therefore, not properly a dialogue, any more than the eighth Eclogue
of Virgil. On the contrary, except the lines at the opening and the
conclusion, it might be regarded as two separate elegies, in which the
pastoral tone is uncommonly well preserved, and each of which, by its
divisions and arrangements, is made to resemble an Italian _canzone_.
An air of freshness and even originality is thus given to the structure
of the entire pastoral, while, at the same time, the melancholy, but
glowing, passion that breathes through it renders it in a high degree
poetical.
[781] I am aware that Herrera, in his notes to the poetry of
Garcilasso, says that Garcilasso intended to represent Don
Antonio de Fonseca under the name of Nemoroso. But nearly every
body else supposes he meant that name for Boscan, taking it from
_Bosque_ and _Nemus_; a very obvious conceit. Among the rest,
Cervantes is of this opinion. Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 67.
In the first part, where Salicio laments the unfaithfulness of his
mistress, there is a happy preservation of the air of pastoral life by
a constant, and yet not forced, allusion to natural scenery and rural
objects, as in the following passage:--
For thee, the silence of the shady wood
I loved; for thee, the secret mountain-top,
Which dwells apart, glad in its solitude;
For thee, I loved the verdant grass, the wind
That breathed so fresh and cool, the lily pale,
The blushing rose, and all the fragrant treasures
Of the opening spring! But, O! how far
From all I thought, from all I trusted, amidst
Loving scenes like these, was that dark falsehood
That lay hid within thy treacherous heart![782]
[782]
Por ti el silencio de la selva umbrosa,
Por ti la esquividad y apartimiento
Del solitario monte me agradaba:
Por ti la verde hierba, el fresco viento,
El blanco lirio y colorada rosa,
Y dulce primavera deseaba.
Ay! quanto me engañaba,
Ay! quan diferente era,
Y quan de otra manera
Lo que en tu falso pecho se escondia.
Obras de Garcilasso de la Vega, ed. Azara, Madrid,
1765, 12mo, p. 5.
Something of the same idea and turn of phrase occurs in Mendoza’s
Epistle to Boscan, which will be noticed hereafter.
The other division of the Eclogue contains passages that remind us
both of Milton’s “Lycidas” and of the ancients whom Milton imitated.
Thus, in the following lines, where the opening idea is taken from a
well-known passage in the Odyssey, the conclusion is not unworthy of
the thought that precedes it, and adds a new charm to what so many
poets since Homer had rendered familiar:[783]--
[783] Odyss. T. 518-524. Moschus, too, has it, and Virgil; but
it is more to the present purpose to say, that it is found in
Boscan’s “Leandro.”
And as the nightingale that hides herself
Amidst the sheltering leaves, and sorrows there,
Because the unfeeling hind, with cruel craft,
Hath stole away her unfledged offspring dear,--
Stole them from out the nest that was their home,
While she was absent from the bough she loved,--
And pours her grief in sweetest melody,
Filling the air with passionate complaint,
Amidst the silence of the gloomy night,
Calling on heaven and heaven’s pure stars
To witness her great wrong;--so I am yielded up
To misery, and mourn, in vain, that Death
Should thrust his hand into my inmost heart,
And bear away, as from its nest and home,
The love I cherished with unceasing care![784]
[784]
Qual suele el ruyseñor, con triste canto,
Quexarse, entre las hojas encondido,
Del duro laborador, que cautamente
Le despojo su caro y dulce nido
De los tiernos hijuelos, entre tanto
Que del amado ramo estaua ausente;
Y aquel dolor que siente,
Con diferencia tanta,
Por la dulce garganta
Despide, y a su canto el ayre suena;
Y la callada noche no refrena
Su lamentable oficio y sus querellas,
Trayendo de su pena
El cielo por testigo y las estrellas:
Desta manera suelto yo la rienda
A mi dolor, y anssi me quejo en vano
De la dureza de la muerte ayrada:
Ella en mi coraçon metyó la mano,
Y d’ alli me lleuó mi dulçe prenda,
Que aquel era su nido y su morada.
Obras de Garcilasso de la Vega, ed. Azara, 1765,
p. 14.
Garcilasso’s versification is uncommonly sweet, and well suited to the
tender and sad character of his poetry. In his second Eclogue, he has
tried the singular experiment of making the rhyme often, not between
the ends of two lines, but between the end of one and the middle of the
next. It was not, however, successful. Cervantes has imitated it, and
so have one or two others; but wherever the rhyme is quite obvious,
the effect is not good, and where it is little noticed, the lines
take rather the character of blank verse.[785] In general, however,
Garcilasso’s harmony can hardly be improved; at least, not without
injuring his versification in particulars yet more important.
[785] For example,--
Albanio, si tu mal comuni_cáras_
Con otro, que pen_sáras_, que tu _péna_
Juzgara como _agéna_, o que este fuego, etc.
I know of no earlier instance of this precise rhyme, which is
quite different from the lawless rhymes that sometimes broke the
verses of the Minnesingers and Troubadours. Cervantes used it,
nearly a century afterwards, in his “Cancion de Grisóstomo,”
(Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 14,) and Pellicer, in his commentary
on the passage, regards Cervantes as the inventor of it. Perhaps
Garcilasso’s rhymes had escaped all notice; for they are not
the subject of remark by his learned commentators. In English,
instances of this peculiarity may be found occasionally amidst
the riotous waste of rhymes in Southey’s “Curse of Kehama,” and
in Italian they occur in Alfieri’s “Saul,” Act III. sc. 4. I do
not remember to have seen them again in Spanish except in some
_décimas_ of Pedro de Salas, printed in 1638, and in the second
_jornada_ of the “Pretendiente al Reves” of Tirso de Molina,
1634. No doubt they occur elsewhere, but they are rare, I think.
His poems had a great success from the moment they appeared. There
was a grace and an elegance about them of which Boscan may in part
have set the example, but which Boscan was never able to reach. The
Spaniards who came back from Rome and Naples were delighted to find at
home what had so much charmed them in their campaigns and wanderings
in Italy; and Garcilasso’s poems were proudly reprinted wherever the
Spanish arms and influence extended. They received, too, other honors.
In less than half a century from their first appearance, Francisco
Sanchez, commonly called “El Brocense,” the most learned Spaniard of
his age, added a commentary to them, which has still some value. A
little later, Herrera, the lyric poet, published them, with a series
of notes yet more ample, in which, amidst much that is useless,
interesting details may be found, for which he was indebted to Puerto
Carrero, the poet’s son-in-law. And early in the next century, Tamayo
de Vargas again encumbered the whole with a new mass of unprofitable
learning.[786] Such distinctions, however, constituted, even when they
were fresh, little of Garcilasso’s real glory, which rested on the
safer foundations of a genuine and general regard. His poetry, from the
first, sunk deep into the hearts of his countrymen. His sonnets were
heard everywhere; his eclogues were acted like popular dramas.[787]
The greatest geniuses of his nation express for him a reverence they
show to none of their predecessors. Lope de Vega imitates him in every
possible way; Cervantes praises him more than he does any other poet,
and cites him oftener.[788] And thus Garcilasso has come down to us
enjoying a general national admiration, such as is given to hardly any
other Spanish poet, and to none that lived before his time.
[786] Francisco Sanchez--who was named at home El Brocense,
because he was born at Las Brozas in Estremadura, but is
known elsewhere as Sanctius, the author of the “Minerva,” and
other works of learning--published his edition of Garcilasso
at Salamanca, 1574, 18mo; a modest work, which has been
printed often since. This was followed at Seville, in 1580,
by the elaborate edition of Herrera, in 8vo, filling nearly
seven hundred pages, chiefly with its commentary, which is so
cumbersome, that it has never been reprinted, though it contains
a good deal important, both to the history of Garcilasso, and
to the elucidation of the earlier Spanish literature. Tamayo
de Vargas was not satisfied with either of them, and published
a commentary of his own at Madrid in 1622, 18mo, but it is of
little worth. Perhaps the most agreeable edition of Garcilasso
is one published, without its editor’s name, in 1765, by the
Chevalier Joseph Nicolas de Azara; long the ambassador of Spain
at Rome, and at the head of what was most distinguished in the
intellectual society of that capital. In English, Garcilasso was
made known by J. H. Wiffen, who, in 1823, published at London,
in 8vo, a translation of all his works, prefixing a Life and an
Essay on Spanish Poetry; but the translation is constrained, and
fails in the harmony that so much distinguishes the original,
and the dissertation is heavy and not always accurate in its
statement of facts.
[787] Don Quixote, (Parte II. c. 58,) after leaving the Duke and
Duchess, finds a party about to represent one of Garcilasso’s
Eclogues, at a sort of _fête champêtre_.
[788] I notice that the allusions to Garcilasso by Cervantes are
chiefly in the latter part of his life; namely, in the second
part of his Don Quixote, in his Comedias, his Novelas, and his
“Persiles y Sigismunda,” as if his admiration were the result of
his matured judgment. More than once he calls him “the prince
of Spanish poets”; but this title, which can be traced back to
Herrera, and has been continued down to our own times, has,
perhaps, rarely been taken literally.
That it would have been better for himself and for the literature of
his country, if he had drawn more from the elements of the earlier
national character, and imitated less the great Italian masters he
justly admired, can hardly be doubted. It would have given a freer and
more generous movement to his poetical genius, and opened to him a
range of subjects and forms of composition, from which, by rejecting
the example of the national poets that had gone before him, he excluded
himself.[789] But he deliberately decided otherwise; and his great
success, added to that of Boscan, introduced into Spain an Italian
school of poetry which has been an important part of Spanish literature
ever since.[790]
[789] How decidedly Garcilasso rejected the Spanish poetry
written before his time can be seen, not only by his own
example, but by his letter prefixed to Boscan’s translation of
Castiglione, where he says that he holds it to be a great benefit
to the Spanish language to translate into it things really
worthy to be read; “for,” he adds, “I know not what ill luck has
always followed us, but hardly any body has written any thing
in our tongue worthy of that trouble.” It may be noted, on the
other hand, that scarcely a word or phrase used by Garcilasso
has ceased to be accounted pure Castilian;--a remark that can
be extended, I think, to no writer so early. His language lives
as he does, and, in no small degree, _because_ his success has
consecrated it. The word _desbañar_, in his second Eclogue, is,
perhaps, the only exception to this remark.
[790] Eleven years after the publication of the works of Boscan
and Garcilasso, Hernando de Hozes, in the Preface to his
“Triumfos de Petrarca,” (Medina del Campo, 1554, 4to,) says,
with much truth: “Since Garcilasso de la Vega and Juan Boscan
introduced Tuscan measures into our Spanish language, every thing
earlier, written or translated, in the forms of verse then used
in Spain, has so much lost reputation, that few now care to read
it, though, as we all know, some of it is of great value.” If
this opinion had continued to prevail, Spanish literature would
not have become what it now is.
CHAPTER III.
IMITATIONS OF THE ITALIAN MANNER.--ACUÑA.--CETINA.--OPPOSITION TO
IT.--CASTILLEJO.--ANTONIO DE VILLEGAS.--SILVESTRE.--DISCUSSIONS
CONCERNING IT.--ARGOTE DE MOLINA.--MONTALVO.--LOPE DE VEGA.--ITS FINAL
SUCCESS.
The example set by Boscan and Garcilasso was so well suited to the
spirit and demands of the age, that it became as much a fashion, at the
court of Charles the Fifth, to write in the Italian manner as it did
to travel in Italy or make a military campaign there. Among those who
earliest adopted the forms of Italian verse was Fernando de Acuña, a
gentleman belonging to a noble Portuguese family, but born in Madrid
and writing only in Spanish. He served in Flanders, in Italy, and in
Africa; and after the conquest of Tunis, in 1535, a mutiny having
occurred in its garrison, he was sent there by the Emperor, with
unlimited authority to punish or to pardon those implicated in it; a
difficult mission, whose duties he fulfilled with great discretion and
with an honorable generosity.
In other respects, too, Acuña was treated with peculiar confidence.
Charles the Fifth--as we learn from the familiar correspondence of Van
Male, a poor scholar and gentleman who slept often in his bed-chamber
and nursed him in his infirmities--amused the fretfulness of a
premature old age, under which his proud spirit constantly chafed, by
making a translation into Spanish prose of a French poem then much
in vogue and favor,--the “Chevalier Délibéré.” Its author, Olivier de
la Marche, was long attached to the service of Mary of Burgundy, the
Emperor’s grandmother, and had made, in the Chevalier Délibéré, an
allegorical show of the events in the life of her father, so flattering
as to render his picture an object of general admiration at the time
when Charles was educated at her brilliant court.[791] But the great
Emperor, though his prose version of the pleasant reading of his youth
is said to have been prepared with more skill and success than might
have been anticipated from his imperfect training for such a task, felt
that he was unable to give it the easy dress he desired it should wear
in Castilian verse. This labor, therefore, in the plenitude of his
authority, he assigned to Acuña; confiding to him the manuscript he had
prepared in great secrecy, and requiring him to cast it into a more
appropriate and agreeable form.
[791] Goujet, Bibliothèque Française, Paris, 1745, 12mo, Tom. IX.
pp. 372-380.
Acuña was well fitted for the delicate duty assigned to him. As a
courtier, skilled in the humors of the palace, he omitted several
passages that would be little interesting to his master, and inserted
others that would be more so,--particularly several relating to
Ferdinand and Isabella, and to Philip, Charles’s father. As a poet,
he turned the Emperor’s prose into the old double _quintillas_
with a purity and richness of idiom rare in any period of Spanish
literature, and some portion of the merit of which has, perhaps justly,
been attributed by Van Male to the Imperial version out of which it
was constructed. The poem thus prepared--making three hundred and
seventy-nine stanzas of ten short lines each--was then secretly given
by Charles, as if it were a present worthy of a munificent sovereign,
to Van Male, the poor servant, who records the facts relating to it,
and then, forbidding all notice of himself in the Preface, the Emperor
ordered an edition of it, so large, that the unhappy scholar trembled
at the pecuniary risks he was to run on account of the bounty he had
received. The “Cavallero Determinado,” as it was called in the version
of Acuña, was, however, more successful than Van Male supposed it
would be; and, partly from the interest the master of so many kingdoms
must have felt in a work in which his secret share was considerable;
partly from the ingenuity of the allegory, which is due in general to
La Marche; and partly from the fluency and grace of the versification,
which must be wholly Acuña’s, it became very popular; seven editions of
it being called for in the course of half a century.[792]
[792] It is something like the well-known German poem
“Theuerdank,” which was devoted to the adventures of Maximilian
I. up to the time when he married Mary of Burgundy, and, like
that, owes some of its reputation to the bold engravings with
which its successive editions were ornamented. One of the best
of the Cavallero Determinado is the Plantiniana, Anvers, 1591,
8vo. The account of the part--earlier unsuspected--borne by
the Emperor in the composition of the Cavallero Determinado is
found on pp. 15 and 16 of the “Lettres sur la Vie Intérieure de
l’Empereur Charles Quint, par Guillaume Van Male, Gentilhomme
de sa Chambre, publiées pour la première fois par le Baron de
Reiffenberg, Bruxelles, Société des Bibliophiles Belgiques, à
Bruxelles, 1843,” 4to; a very curious collection of thirty-one
Latin letters, that often contain strange details of the
infirmities of the Emperor from 1550 to 1555. Their author, Van
Male, or Malinæus as he was called in Latin, and Malinez in
Spanish, was one of the needy Flemings who sought favor at the
court of Charles V. Being ill treated by the Duke of Alva, who
was his first patron; by Avila y Zuñiga, whose Commentaries he
translated into Latin, in order to purchase his regard; and by
the Emperor, to whom he rendered many kind and faithful services,
he was, like many others who had come to Spain with similar
hopes, glad to return to Flanders as poor as he came. He died
in 1560. He was an accomplished and simple-hearted scholar, and
deserved a better fate than to be rewarded for his devotion to
the Imperial humors by a present of Acuña’s manuscript, which
Avila had the malice to assure the Emperor would be well worth
five hundred gold crowns to the suffering man of letters;--a
remark to which the Emperor replied by saying, “William will come
rightfully by the money; he has sweat hard at the work,”--“Bono
jure fructus ille ad Gulielmum redeat; ut qui plurimum in illo
opere sudârit.” Of the Emperor’s personal share in the version
of the Chevalier Délibéré Van Male gives the following account
(Jan. 13, 1551):--“Cæsar maturat editionem libri, cui titulus
erat Gallicus,--Le Chevalier Délibéré. Hunc per otium _a seipso
traductum_ tradidit Ferdinando Acunæ, Saxonis custodi, ut ab
eo aptaretur ad numeros rithmi Hispanici; quæ res cecidit
felicissimè. _Cæsari, sine dubio, debetur primaria traductionis
industria, cùm non solùm linguam, sed et carmen et vocum
significantiam mirè expressit_,” etc. Epist. vi.
A version of the Chevalier Délibéré was also made by Gerónimo de
Urrea, and was printed in 1555. I have never seen it.
But notwithstanding the success of the Cavallero Determinado, Acuña
wrote hardly any thing else in the old national style and manner.
His shorter poems, filling a small volume, are, with one or two
inconsiderable exceptions, in the Italian measures, and sometimes are
direct imitations of Boscan and Garcilasso. They are almost all written
in good taste, and with a classical finish, especially “The Contest of
Ajax with Ulysses,” where, in tolerable blank verse, Acuña has imitated
the severe simplicity of Homer. He was known, too, in Italy, and his
translation of a part of Boiardo’s “Orlando Innamorato” was praised
there; but his miscellanies and his sonnets found more favor at home.
He died at Granada, it is said, in 1580, while prosecuting a claim he
had inherited to a Spanish title; but his poems were not printed till
1591, when, like those of Boscan, with which they may be fairly ranked,
they were published by the pious care of his widow.[793]
[793] The second edition of Acuña’s Poesías is that of Madrid,
1804, 12mo. His life is in Baena, “Hijos de Madrid,” Tom. II. p.
387; Tom. IV. p. 403.
Less fortunate in this respect than Acuña was Gutierre de Cetina,
another Spaniard of the same period and school, since no attempt
has ever been made to collect his poems. The few that remain to us,
however,--his madrigals, sonnets, and other short pieces,--have
much merit. Sometimes they take an Anacreontic tone; but the better
specimens are rather marked by sweetness, like the following
madrigal:--
Eyes, that have still serenely shone,
And still for gentleness been praised,
Why thus in anger are ye raised,
When turned on me, and me alone?
The more ye tenderly and gently beam,
The more to all ye winning seem;--
But yet,--O, yet,--dear eyes, serene and sweet,
Turn on me still, whate’er the glance I meet![794]
[794]
Ojos claros serenos,
Si de dulce mirar sois alabados,
Porqué, si me mirais, mirais ayrados?
Si quanto mas piadosos,
Mas bellos pareceis á quien os mira,
Porqué a mí solo me mirais con ira?
Ojos claros serenos,
Ya que asi me mirais, miradme al menos.
Sedano, Parnaso Español, Tom. VII. p. 75.
Like many others of his countrymen, Cetina was a soldier, and fought
bravely in Italy. Afterwards he visited Mexico, where he had a brother
in an important public office; but he died, at last, in Seville, his
native city, about the year 1560. He was an imitator of Garcilasso,
even more than of the Italians who were Garcilasso’s models.[795]
[795] A few of Cetina’s poems are inserted by Herrera in his
notes to Garcilasso, 1580, pp. 77, 92, 190, 204, 216, etc.; and
a few more by Sedano in the “Parnaso Español,” Tom. VII. pp. 75,
370; Tom. VIII. pp. 96, 216; Tom. IX. p. 134. The little we know
of him is in Sismondi, Lit. Esp., Sevilla, 1841, Tom. I. p. 381.
Probably he died young. (Conde Lucanor, 1575, ff. 93, 94.) The
poems of Cetina were, in 1776, extant in a MS. in the library of
the Duke of Arcos, at Madrid. (Obras Sueltas de Lope de Vega,
Madrid, 1776, 4to, Tom. I., Prólogo, p. ii., note.) It is much to
be desired that they should be sought out and published.
In a sonnet by Castillejo, found in his attack on the Italian
school, (Obras, 1598, f. 114. a) he speaks of Luis de Haro as one
of the four persons who had most contributed to the success of
that school in Spain. I know of no poetry by any author of this
name.
But an Italian school was not introduced into Spanish literature
without a contest. We cannot, perhaps, tell who first broke ground
against it, as an unprofitable and unjustifiable innovation; but
Christóval de Castillejo, a gentleman of Ciudad Rodrigo, was the most
efficient of its early opponents. He was attached, from the age of
fifteen, to the person of Ferdinand, the younger brother of Charles the
Fifth, and subsequently Emperor of Germany; passing a part of his life
in Austria, as secretary to that prince, and ending it, in extreme old
age, as a Carthusian monk, at the convent of Val de Iglesias, near
Toledo. But wherever he lived, Castillejo wrote verses, and showed
no favor to the new school. He attacked it in many ways, but chiefly
by imitating the old masters in their _villancicos_, _canciones_,
_glosas_, and the other forms and measures they adopted, though with a
purer and better taste than they had generally shown.
Some of his poetry was written as early as 1540 and 1541; and, except
the religious portion, which fills the latter part of the third and
last of the three books into which his works are divided, it has
generally a fresh and youthful air. Facility and gayety are, perhaps,
its most prominent, though certainly not its highest, characteristics.
Some of his love-verses are remarkable for their tenderness and grace,
especially those addressed to Anna; but he shows the force and bent of
his talent rather when he deals with practical life, as he does in his
bitter discussion concerning the court; in a dialogue between his pen
and himself; in a poem on Woman; and in a letter to a friend, asking
counsel about a love affair;--all of which are full of living sketches
of the national manners and feelings. Next to these, perhaps, some of
his more fanciful pieces, such as his “Transformation of a Drunkard
into a Mosquito,” are the most characteristic of his light-hearted
nature.
But on every occasion where he finds an opening, or can make one, he
attacks the imitators of the Italians, whom he contemptuously calls
“Petrarquistas.” Once, he devotes to them a regular satire, which he
addresses “to those who give up the Castilian measures and follow the
Italian,” calling out Boscan and Garcilasso by name, and summoning
Juan de Mena, Sanchez de Badajoz, Naharro, and others of the elder
poets, to make merry with him, at the expense of the innovators.
Almost everywhere he shows a genial temperament, and sometimes indulges
himself in a freer tone than was thought beseeming at the time when
he lived; in consequence of which, his poetry, though much circulated
in manuscript, was forbidden by the Inquisition; so that all we now
possess of it is a selection, which, by a sort of special favor, was
exempted from censure, and permitted to be printed in 1573.[796]
[796] The little that is known of Castillejo is to be found in
his Poems, the publication of which was first permitted to Juan
Lopez de Velasco. Antonio says, that Castillejo died about 1596,
in which case he must have been very old; especially if, as
Moratin thinks, he was born in 1494! But the facts stated about
him are quite uncertain, with the exception of those told by
himself. (L. F. Moratin, Obras, Tom. I. Parte I. pp. 154-156.)
His works were well published at Antwerp, by Bellero, in 1598,
18mo, and in Madrid, by Sanchez, in 1600, 18mo, and they form the
twelfth and thirteenth volumes of the Collection of Fernandez,
Madrid, 1792, 12mo, besides which I have seen editions cited of
1582, 1615, etc. His dramas are lost;--even the “Costanza,” which
Moratin saw in the Escurial, could not be found there in 1844,
when I caused a search to be made for it.
Another of those who maintained the doctrines and wrote in the measures
of the old school was Antonio de Villegas, whose poems, though written
before 1551, were not printed till 1565. The Prólogo, addressed to
the book, with instructions how it should bear itself in the world,
reminds us sometimes of “The Soul’s Errand,” but is more easy and less
poetical. The best poems of the volume are, indeed, of this sort, light
and gay; rather running into pretty quaintnesses than giving token of
deep feeling. The longer among them, like those on Pyramus and Thisbe,
and on the quarrel between Ulysses and Ajax, are the least interesting.
But the shorter pieces are many of them very agreeable. One to the Duke
of Sesa, the descendant of Gonzalvo of Córdova, and addressed to him
as he was going to Italy, where Cervantes served under his leading, is
fortunate, from its allusion to his great ancestor. It begins thus:--
Go forth to Italy, great chief;
It is thy fated land,
Sown thick with deeds of brave emprise
By that ancestral hand
Which cast its seeds so widely there,
That, as thou marchest on,
The very soil will start afresh,
Teeming with glories won;
While round thy form, like myriad suns,
Shall shine a halo’s flame,
Enkindled from the dazzling light
Of thy great father’s fame.
More characteristic than this, however, because less heroic and grave,
are eighteen _décimas_, or ten-line poems, called “Comparaciones,”
because each ends with a comparison; the whole being preceded by a
longer composition in the same style, addressing them all to his
lady-love. The following may serve as a specimen of their peculiar tone
and measure:--
Lady! so used my soul is grown
To serve thee always in pure truth,
That, drawn to thee, and thee alone,
My joys come thronging; and my youth
No grief can jar, save when thou grievest its tone.
But though my faithful soul be thus in part
Untuned, when dissonance it feels in thee,
Still, still to thine turns back my trembling heart,
As jars the well-tuned string in sympathy
With that which trembles at the tuner’s art.[797]
[797] _Comparacion._
Señora, estan ya tan diestras
En serviros mis porfias,
Que acuden como a sus muestras
Sola a vos mis alegrias,
Y mis sañas a las vuestras.
Y aunque en parte se destempla
Mi estado de vuestro estado,
Mi ser al vuestro contempla,
Como instrumento templado
Al otro con quien se templa.
f. 37.
These poems are in a small volume of miscellanies, published at
Medina del Campo, called “Inventario de Obras, por Antonio de
Villegas, Vezino de la Villa de Medina del Campo,” 1565, 4to.
The copy I use is of another, and, I believe, the only other,
edition, Medina del Campo, 1577, 12mo. Like other poets who
deal in prettinesses, Villegas repeats himself occasionally,
because he so much admires his own conceits. Thus, the idea
in the little _décima_ translated in the text is also in a
pastoral--half poetry, half prose--in the same volume. “Assi como
dos instrumentos bien templados tocando las cuerdas del uno se
tocan y suenan las del otro ellas mismas; assi yo en viendo este
triste, me assoné con el,” etc. (f. 14, b.) It should be noticed,
that the license to print the Inventario, dated 1551, shows it to
have been written as early as that period.
Gregorio Silvestre, a Portuguese, who came in his childhood to Spain,
and died there in 1570, was another of those who wrote according to the
earlier modes of composition. He was a friend of Torres de Naharro, of
Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, and of Heredia; and, for some time, imitated
Castillejo in speaking lightly of Boscan and Garcilasso. But, as the
Italian manner prevailed more and more, he yielded somewhat to the
fashion; and, in his latter years, wrote sonnets, and _ottava_ and
_terza rima_, adding to their forms a careful finish not then enough
valued in Spain.[798] All his poetry, notwithstanding the accident
of his foreign birth, is written in pure and idiomatic Castilian;
but the best of it is in the older style,--“the old rhymes,” as he
called them,--in which, apparently, he felt more freedom than he did
in the manner he subsequently adopted. His Glosses seem to have been
most regarded by himself and his friends; and if the nature of the
composition itself had been more elevated, they might still deserve
the praise they at first received, for he shows great facility and
ingenuity in their construction.[799]
[798] He is much praised for this in a poetical epistle of Luis
Barahona de Soto, printed with Silvestre’s works, Granada, 1599,
12mo, f. 330.
[799] The best are his glosses on the Paternoster, f. 284, and
the Ave Maria, f. 289.
His longer narrative poems--those on Daphne and Apollo, and on Pyramus
and Thisbe, as well as one he called “The Residence of Love”--are
not without merit, though they are among the less fortunate of his
efforts. But his _canciones_ are to be ranked with the very best in the
language; full of the old true-hearted simplicity of feeling, and yet
not without an artifice in their turns of expression, which, far from
interfering with their point and effect, adds to both. Thus, one of
them begins:--
Your locks are all of gold, my lady,
And of gold each priceless hair;
And the heart is all of steel, my lady,
That sees them without despair.
While a little farther on he gives to the same idea a quaint turn, or
answer, such as he delighted to make:--
Not of gold would be your hair, dear lady,
No, not of gold so fair;
But the fine, rich gold itself, dear lady,
That gold would be your hair.[800]
[800]
Señora, vuestros cabellos
De oro son,
Y de azero el coraçon,
Que no se muere por ellos.
Obras, Granada, 1599, 12mo, f. 69.
No quieren ser de oro, no,
Señora, vuestros cabellos,
Quel oro quiere ser dellos.
Ibid., f. 71.
Each is followed by a sort of gloss, or variation of the original air,
which again is not without its appropriate merit.
Silvestre was much connected with the poets of his time; not only
those of the old school, but those of the Italian, like Diego de
Mendoza, Hernando de Acuña, George of Montemayor, and Luis Barahona de
Soto. Their poems, in fact, are sometimes found mingled with his own,
and their spirit, we see, had a controlling influence over his. But
whether, in return, he produced much effect on them, or on his times,
may be doubted. He seems to have passed his life quietly in Granada,
of whose noble cathedral he was the principal musician, and where he
was much valued as a member of society, for his wit and kindly nature.
But when he died, at the age of fifty, his poetry was known only in
manuscript; and after it was collected and published by his friend
Pedro de Caceres, twelve years later, it produced little sensation.
He belonged, in truth, to both schools, and was therefore thoroughly
admired by neither.[801]
[801] There were three editions of the poetry of Silvestre;--two
at Granada, 1582 and 1599; and one at Lisbon, 1592, with a very
good life of him by his editor, to which occasional additions are
made, though, on the whole, it is abridged, by Barbosa, Tom. II.
p. 419. Luis Barahona de Soto, the friend of Silvestre, speaks of
him pleasantly in several of his poetical epistles, and Lope de
Vega praises him in the second Silva of his “Laurel de Apolo.”
His Poems are divided into four books, and fill 387 leaves in
the edition of 1599, 18mo. He wrote also, religious dramas for
his cathedral, which are lost. One single word is ordered by the
Index of 1667 (p. 465) to be expurgated from his works!
The discussion between the two, however, soon became a formal one.
Argote de Molina naturally brought it into his Discourse on Spanish
Poetry in 1575,[802] and Montalvo introduced it into his Pastoral,
where it little belongs, but where, under assumed names, Cervantes,
Ercilla, Castillejo, Silvestre, and Montalvo[803] himself, give their
opinions in favor of the old school. This was in 1582. In 1599, Lope de
Vega defended the same side in the Preface to his “San Isidro.”[804]
But the question was then substantially decided. Five or six long
epics, including the “Araucana,” had already been written in the
Italian _ottava rima_; as many pastorals, in imitation of Sannazaro’s;
and thousands of verses in the shape of sonnets, _canzoni_, and the
other forms of Italian poetry, a large portion of which had found
much favor. Even Lope de Vega, therefore, who is quite decided in
his opinion, and wrote his poem of “San Isidro” in the old popular
_redondillas_, fell in with the prevailing fashion, so that, perhaps,
in the end, nobody did more than himself to confirm the Italian
measures and manner. From this time, therefore, the success of the new
school may be considered certain and settled; nor has it ever since
been displaced or superseded, as an important division of Spanish
literature.
[802] The Discourse follows the first edition of the “Conde
Lucanor,” 1575, and is strongly in favor of the old Spanish
verse. Argote de Molina wrote poetry himself, but such as he has
given us in his “Nobleza” is of little value.
[803] Pastor de Filida, Parts IV. and VI.
[804] Obras Sueltas, Madrid, 1777, Tom. XI. pp. xxviii.-xxx.
CHAPTER IV.
DIEGO HURTADO DE MENDOZA.--HIS FAMILY.--HIS LAZARILLO DE TÓRMES, AND
ITS IMITATIONS.--HIS PUBLIC EMPLOYMENTS AND PRIVATE STUDIES.--HIS
RETIREMENT FROM AFFAIRS.--HIS POEMS AND MISCELLANIES.--HIS HISTORY OF
THE REBELLION OF THE MOORS.--HIS DEATH AND CHARACTER.