introduction and establishment of the Italian measures in Spanish
literature was one whose rank and social position gave him great
authority, and whose genius, cultivation, and adventures point alike
to his connection with the period we have just gone over and with
that on which we are now entering. This person was Diego Hurtado de
Mendoza, a scholar and a soldier, a poet and a diplomatist, a statesman
and an historian,--a man who rose to great consideration in whatever
he undertook, and one who was not of a temper to be satisfied with
moderate success, wherever he might choose to make an effort.[805]
[805] Lives of Mendoza are to be found in Antonio, “Bibliotheca
Nova,” and in the edition of the “Guerra de Granada,” Valencia,
1776, 4to;--the last of which was written by Iñigo Lopez de
Ayala, the learned Professor of Poetry at Madrid. Cerdá, in
Vossii Rhetorices, Matriti, 1781, 8vo, App., p. 189, note.
He was born in Granada in 1503, and his ancestry was perhaps the most
illustrious in Spain, if we except the descendants of those who had
sat on the thrones of its different kingdoms. Lope de Vega, who turns
aside in one of his plays to boast that it was so, adds, that, in
his time, the Mendozas counted three-and-twenty generations of the
highest nobility and public service.[806] But it is more important
for our present purpose to notice that the three immediate ancestors
of the distinguished statesman now before us might well have served
as examples to form his young character; for he was the third in
direct descent from the Marquis of Santillana, the poet and wit of the
court of John the Second; his grandfather was the able ambassador of
Ferdinand and Isabella, in their troublesome affairs with the See of
Rome; and his father, after commanding with distinguished honor in the
last great overthrow of the Moors, was made governor of the unquiet
city of Granada not long after its surrender.
[806]
Toma
Veinte y tres generaciones
La prosapia de Mendoça.
No hay linage en toda España,
De quien conozca
Tan notable antiguedad.
De padre á hijos se nombran,
Sin interrumpir la linea,
Tan excelentes personas,
Y de tanta calidad,
Que fuera nombrarlas todas
Contar estrellas al cielo,
Y á la mar arenas y ondas:
Desde el señor de Vizcaya,
Llamado Zuria, consta
Que tiene origen su sangre.
For three-and-twenty generations past
Hath the Mendozas’ name been nobly great.
In all the realm of Spain, no other race
Can claim such notable antiquity;
For, reckoning down from sire to son, they boast,
Without a break in that long, glorious line,
So many men of might, men known to fame,
And of such noble and grave attributes,
That the attempt to count them all were vain
As would be his who sought to count the stars,
Or the wide sea’s unnumbered waves and sands.
Their noble blood goes back to Zuria,
The lord of all Biscay.
Arauco Domado, Acto III., Comedias, Tom. XX. 4to, 1629,
f. 95.
Gaspar de Avila, in the first act of his “Governador Prudente,”
(Comedias Escogidas, Madrid, 4to, Tomo XXI., 1664,) gives even a
more minute genealogy of the Mendozas than that of Lope de Vega;
so famous were they in verse as well as in history.
Diego, however, had five brothers older than himself; and therefore,
notwithstanding the power of his family, he was originally destined for
the Church, in order to give him more easily the position and income
that should sustain his great name with becoming dignity. But his
character could not be bent in that direction. He acquired, indeed,
much knowledge suited to further his ecclesiastical advancement, both
at home, where he learned to speak the Arabic with fluency, and at
Salamanca, where he studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, and canon and
civil law, with success. But it is evident that he indulged a decided
preference for what was more intimately connected with political
affairs and elegant literature; and if, as is commonly supposed, he
wrote while at the University, or soon afterwards, his “Lazarillo de
Tórmes,” it is equally plain that he preferred such a literature as had
no relation to theology or the Church.
The Lazarillo is a work of genius, unlike any thing that had preceded
it. It is the autobiography of a boy--“little Lazarus”--born in a mill
on the banks of the Tórmes, near Salamanca, and sent out by his base
and brutal mother as the leader of a blind beggar; the lowest place
in the social condition, perhaps, that could then be found in Spain.
But such as it is, Lazarillo makes the best or the worst of it. With
an inexhaustible fund of good-humor and great quickness of parts, he
learns, at once, the cunning and profligacy that qualify him to rise to
still greater frauds and a yet wider range of adventures and crimes in
the service successively of a priest, a gentleman starving on his own
pride, a friar, a seller of indulgences, a chaplain, and an alguazil,
until, at last, from the most disgraceful motives, he settles down as a
married man; and then the story terminates without reaching any proper
conclusion, and without intimating that any is to follow.
Its object is--under the character of a servant with an acuteness that
is never at fault, and so small a stock of honesty and truth, that
neither of them stands in the way of his success--to give a pungent
satire on all classes of society, whose condition Lazarillo well
comprehends, because he sees them in undress and behind the scenes.
It is written in a very bold, rich, and idiomatic Castilian style,
that reminds us of the “Celestina”; and some of its sketches are among
the most fresh and spirited that can be found in the whole class of
prose works of fiction; so spirited, indeed, and so free, that two of
them--those of the friar and the seller of dispensations--were soon
put under the ban of the Church, and cut out of the editions that were
permitted to be printed under its authority. The whole work is short;
but its easy, genial temper, its happy adaptation to Spanish life and
manners, and the contrast of the light, good-humored, flexible audacity
of Lazarillo himself--a perfectly original conception--with the solemn
and unyielding dignity of the old Castilian character, gave it from the
first a great popularity. From 1553, when the earliest edition appeared
of which we have any knowledge, it was often reprinted, both at home
and abroad, and has been more or less a favorite in all languages,
down to our own time; becoming the foundation for a class of fictions
essentially national, which, under the name of the _gusto picaresco_,
or the style of the rogues, is as well known as any other department of
Spanish literature, and one which the “Gil Blas” of Le Sage has made
famous throughout the world.[807]
[807] The number of editions of the Lazarillo, during the
sixteenth century, in the Low Countries, in Italy, and in Spain
is great; but those printed in Spain, beginning with the one of
Madrid, 1573, 18mo, are expurgated of the passages most offensive
to the clergy by an order of the Inquisition; an order renewed
in the Index Expurgatorius, 1667. Indeed, I do not know how the
chapter on the seller of indulgences could have been written by
any but a Protestant, after the Reformation was so far advanced
as it then was. Mendoza does not seem ever to have acknowledged
himself to be the author of Lazarillo de Tórmes, which, in
fact, was sometimes attributed to Juan de Ortega, a monk. Of a
translation of Lazarillo into English, reported by Lowndes (art.
_Lazarillo_) as the work of David Rowland, 1586, and probably the
same praised in the Retrospective Review, Vol. II. p. 133, above
twenty editions are known. Of a translation by James Blakeston,
which seems to me better, I have a copy, dated London, 1670, 18mo.
Like other books enjoying a wide reputation, the Lazarillo provoked
many imitations. A continuation of it, under the title of “The Second
Part of Lazarillo de Tórmes,” soon appeared, longer than the original,
and beginning where the fiction of Mendoza leaves off. But it is
without merit, except for an occasional quaintness or witticism. It
represents Lazarillo as going upon the expedition undertaken by Charles
the Fifth against Algiers, in 1541, and as being in one of the vessels
that foundered in a storm, which did much towards disconcerting the
whole enterprise. From this point, however, Lazarillo’s story becomes a
tissue of absurdities. He sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and there
creeps into a cave, where he is metamorphosed into a tunny-fish; and
the greater part of the work consists of an account of his glory and
happiness in the kingdom of the tunnies. At last, he is caught in a
seine, and, in the agony of his fear of death, returns, by an effort of
his own will, to the human form; after which he finds his way back to
Salamanca, and is living there when he prepares this strange account of
his adventures.[808]
[808] This continuation was printed at Antwerp in 1555, as “La
Segunda Parte de Lazarillo de Tórmes,” but probably appeared
earlier in Spain.
A further imitation, but not a proper continuation, under the name
of “The Lazarillo of the Manzanares,” in which the state of society
at Madrid is satirized, was attempted by Juan Cortés de Tolosa, and
was first printed in 1620. But it produced no effect at the time, and
has been long forgotten. Nor was a much better fate reserved for yet
another Second Part of the genuine Lazarillo, which was written by Juan
de Luna, a teacher of Spanish at Paris, and appeared there the same
year the Lazarillo de Manzanares appeared at Madrid. It is, however,
more in the spirit of the original work. It exhibits Lazarillo again as
a servant to different kinds of masters, and as gentleman-usher of a
poor, proud lady of rank; after which he retires from the world, and,
becoming a religious recluse, writes this account of himself, which,
though not equal to the free and vigorous sketches of the work it
professes to complete, is by no means without value, especially for its
style.[809]
[809] Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. pp. 680 and 728. Juan de Luna
is called “H. de Luna” on the title-page of his Lazarillo,--why,
I do not know.
The author of the Lazarillo de Tórmes, who, we are told, took the
“Amadis” and the “Celestina” for his travelling companions and
by-reading,[810] was, as we have intimated, not a person to devote
himself to the Church; and we soon hear of him serving as a soldier
in the great Spanish armies in Italy; a circumstance to which, in his
old age, he alludes with evident pride and pleasure. At those seasons,
however, when the troops were unoccupied, we know that he gladly
listened to the lectures of the famous professors of Bologna, Padua,
and Rome, and added largely to his already large stores of elegant
knowledge.
[810] Francisco de Portugal, in his “Arte de Galantería,”
(Lisboa, 1670, 4to, p. 49,) says, that, when Mendoza went
ambassador to Rome, he took no books with him for travelling
companions but “Amadis de Gaula” and the “Celestina.”
A character so strongly marked would naturally attract the notice of
a monarch, vigilant and clear-sighted, like Charles the Fifth; and
as early as 1538, Mendoza was made his ambassador to the republic of
Venice, then one of the leading powers of Europe. But there, too,
though much busied with grave negotiations, he loved to be familiar
with men of letters. The Aldi were then at the height of their
reputation, and he assisted and patronized them. Paulus Manutius
dedicated to him an edition of the philosophical works of Cicero,
acknowledging his skill as a critic and praising his Latinity, though,
at the same time, he says that Mendoza rather exhorted the young to
study philosophy and science in their native languages;--a proof of
liberality rare in an age when the admiration for the ancients led a
great number of classical scholars to treat whatever was modern and
vernacular with contempt. At one period, he gave himself up to the
pursuit of Greek and Latin literature with a zeal such as Petrarch had
shown long before him. He sent to Thessaly and the famous convent of
Mount Athos, to collect Greek manuscripts. Josephus was first printed
complete from his library, and so were some of the Fathers of the
Church. And when, on one occasion, he had done so great a favor to
the Sultan Soliman that he was invited to demand any return from that
monarch’s gratitude, the only reward he would consent to receive for
himself was a present of some Greek manuscripts, which, as he said,
amply repaid all his services.
But, in the midst of studies so well suited to his taste and character,
the Emperor called him away to more important duties. He was made
military governor of Siena, and required to hold both the Pope and the
Florentines in check; a duty which he fulfilled, though not without
peril to his life. Somewhat later he was sent to the great Council of
Trent, known as a political no less than an ecclesiastical congress, in
order to sustain the Imperial interests there, and succeeded, by the
exercise of a degree of firmness, address, and eloquence which would
alone have made him one of the most considerable persons in the Spanish
monarchy. While at the Council, however, in consequence of the urgency
of affairs, he was despatched, as a special Imperial plenipotentiary
to Rome, in 1547, for the bold purpose of confronting and overawing
the Pope in his own capital. And in this, too, he succeeded; rebuking
Julius the Third in open council, and so establishing his own
consideration, as well as that of his country, that for six years
afterwards he is to be looked upon as the head of the Imperial party
throughout Italy, and almost as a viceroy governing that country, or
a large part of it, for the Emperor, by his talents and firmness. But
at last he grew weary of this great labor and burden; and the Emperor
himself having changed his system and determined to conciliate Europe
before he should abdicate, Mendoza returned to Spain in 1554.[811]
[811] Mendoza’s success as an ambassador passed into a proverb.
Nearly a century afterwards, Salas Barbadillo, in one of his
tales, says of a _chevalier d’industrie_, “According to his own
account, he was an ambassador to Rome, and as much of one as
that wise and great knight, Diego de Mendoza, was in his time.”
Cavallero Puntual, Segunda Parte, Madrid, 1619, 12mo, f. 5.
The next year, Philip the Second ascended the throne. His policy,
however, little resembled that of his father, and Mendoza was not
one of those who were well suited to the changed state of things.
In consequence of this, he seldom came to court, and was not at all
favored by the severe master who now ruled him, as he ruled all the
other great men of his kingdom, with a hard and anxious tyranny.[812]
One instance of his displeasure against Mendoza, and of the harsh
treatment that followed it, is sufficiently remarkable. The ambassador,
who, though sixty-four years of age when the event occurred, had
lost little of the fire of his youth, fell into a passionate dispute
with a courtier in the palace itself. The latter drew a dagger, and
Mendoza wrested it from him and threw it out of the balcony where they
were standing;--some accounts adding, that he afterwards threw out
the courtier himself. Such a quarrel would certainly be accounted an
affront to the royal dignity anywhere; but in the eyes of the formal
and strict Philip the Second it was all but a mortal offence. He chose
to have Mendoza regarded as a madman, and as such exiled him from his
court;--an injustice against which the old man struggled in vain for
some time, and then yielded himself up to it with loyal dignity.
His amusement during some portion of his exile was--singular as it
may seem in one so old--to write poetry.[813] But the occupation had
long been familiar to him. In the first edition of the works of Boscan
we have an epistle from Mendoza to that poet, evidently written when
he was young; besides which, several of his shorter pieces contain
internal proof that they were composed in Italy. But, notwithstanding
he had been so long in Venice and Rome, and notwithstanding Boscan must
have been among his earliest friends, he does not belong entirely to
the Italian school of poetry; for, though he has often imitated and
fully sanctioned the Italian measures, he often gave himself up to
the old _redondillas_ and _quintillas_, and to the national tone of
feeling and reflection appropriate to these ancient forms of Castilian
verse.[814]
[812] Mendoza seems to have been treated harshly by Philip II.
about some money matters relating to his accounts for work done
on the castle of Siena, when he was governor there. Navarrete,
Vida de Cervantes, Madrid, 1819, 8vo, p. 441.
[813] One of his poems is “A Letter in _Redondillas_, being under
Arrest.” Obras, 1610, f. 72.
[814] There is but one edition of the poetry of Mendoza. It
was published by Juan Diaz Hidalgo at Madrid, with a sonnet
of Cervantes prefixed to it, in 1610, 4to; and is a rare and
important book. In the address “Al Lector,” we are told that
his lighter works are not published, as unbecoming his dignity;
and if a sonnet, printed for the first time by Sedano, (Parnaso
Español, Tom. VIII. p. 120,) is to be regarded as a specimen of
those that were suppressed, we have no reason to complain.
There is in the Royal Library at Paris, MS. No. 8293, a
collection of the poetry of Mendoza, which has been supposed to
contain notes in his own handwriting, and which is more ample
than the published volume, Ochoa, Catálogo, Paris, 1844, 4to, p.
532.
The truth is, Mendoza had studied the ancients with a zeal and success
that had so far imbued his mind with their character and temper, as in
some measure to keep out all undue modern influences. The first part of
the Epistle to Boscan, already alluded to, though written in flowing
_terza rima_, sounds almost like a translation of the Epistle of Horace
to Numicius, and yet it is not even a servile imitation; while the
latter part is absolutely Spanish, and gives such a description of
domestic life as never entered the imagination of antiquity.[815] The
Hymn in honor of Cardinal Espinosa, one of the most finished of his
poems, is said to have been written after five days’ constant reading
of Pindar, but is nevertheless full of the old Castilian spirit;[816]
and his second _cancion_, though quite in the Italian measure, shows
the turns of Horace more than of Petrarch.[817] Still, it is not to be
concealed that Mendoza gave the decisive influence of his example to
the new forms introduced by Boscan and Garcilasso;--a fact plain from
the manner in which that example is appealed to by many of the poets
of his time, and especially by Gregorio Silvestre and Christóval de
Mesa.[818] In both styles, however, he succeeded. There is, perhaps,
more richness of thought in the specimens he has given us in the
Italian measures than in the others; yet it can hardly be doubted that
his heart was in what he wrote upon the old popular foundations. Some
of his _letrillas_, as they would now be called, though they bore
different names in his time, are quite charming;[819] and in many parts
of the second division of his poems, which is larger than that devoted
to the Italian measures, there is a light and idle humor, well fitted
to his subjects, and such as might have been anticipated from the
author of the “Lazarillo” rather than from the Imperial representative
at the Council of Trent and the Papal court. Indeed, some of his verses
were so free, that it was thought inexpedient to print them.
[815] This epistle was printed, during Mendoza’s lifetime, in
the first edition of Boscan’s Works (ed. 1543, f. 129); and is
to be found in the Poetical Works of Mendoza himself, (f. 9,) in
Sedano, Faber, etc. The earliest _printed_ work of Mendoza that I
have seen is a _cancion_ in the Cancionero Gen. of 1535, f. 99. b.
[816] The Hymn to Cardinal Espinosa is in the Poetical Works of
Mendoza, f. 143. See also, Sedano, Tom. IV., (Indice, p. ii.,)
for its history.
[817] Obras, f. 99.
[818] See the sonnet of Mendoza in Silvestre’s Poesías, (1599, f.
333,) in which he says,--
De vuestro ingenio y invencion
Piensa hacer industria por do pueda
Subir la tosca rima a perfeccion;
and the epistle of Mesa to the Count de Castro, in Mesa, Rimas,
Madrid, 1611, 12mo, f. 158,--
Acompaño a Boscan y Garcilasso
El inclito Don Diego de Mendoza, etc.
[819] The one called a _Villancico_ (Obras, f. 117) is a specimen
of the best of the gay _letrillas_.
The same spirit is apparent in two prose letters, or rather essays
thrown into the shape of letters. The first professes to come from a
person seeking employment at court, and gives an account of the whole
class of _Catariberas_, or low courtiers, who, in soiled clothes and
with base, fawning manners, daily besieged the doors and walks of the
President of the Council of Castile, in order to solicit some one of
the multitudinous humble offices in his gift. The other is addressed
to Pedro de Salazar, ridiculing a book he had published on the wars of
the Emperor in Germany, in which, as Mendoza declares, the author took
more credit to himself personally than he deserved. Both are written
with idiomatic humor, and a native buoyancy and gayety of spirit which
seem to have lain at the bottom of his character, and to have broken
forth, from time to time, during his whole life, notwithstanding the
severe employments which for so many years filled and burdened his
thoughts.[820]
[820] These two letters are printed in that rude and ill-digested
collection called the “Seminario Erudito,” Madrid, 1789, 4to;
the first in Tom. XVIII., and the second in Tom. XXIV. Pellicer,
however, says that the latter is taken from a very imperfect copy
(ed. Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 1, note); and, from some extracts
of Clemencin, (ed. Don Quixote, Tom. I. p. 5,) I infer that the
other must be so likewise. They pass, in the MS., under the title
of “Cartas del Bachiller de Arcadia.” The _Catariberas_, whom
Mendoza so vehemently attacks in the first of them, seem to have
sunk still lower after his time, and become a sort of jackals to
the lawyers. See the “Soldado Pindaro” of Gonçalo de Cespedes y
Meneses, (Lisboa, 1626, 4to, f. 37. b,) where they are treated
with the cruellest satire. I have seen it suggested that Diego de
Mendoza is not the author of the last of the two letters, but I
do not know on what ground.
The tendency of his mind, however, as he grew old, was naturally to
graver subjects; and finding there was no hope of his being recalled
to court, he established himself in unambitious retirement at Granada,
his native city. But his spirit was not one that would easily sink
into inactivity; and if it had been, he had not chosen a home that
would encourage such a disposition. For it was a spot, not only full
of romantic recollections, but intimately associated with the glory
of his own family,--one where he had spent much of his youth, and
become familiar with those remains and ruins of the Moorish power which
bore witness to days when the plain of Granada was the seat of one of
the most luxurious and splendid of the Mohammedan dynasties. Here,
therefore, he naturally turned to the early studies of his half-Arabian
education, and, arranging his library of curious Moorish manuscripts,
devoted himself to the literature and history of his native city,
until, at last, apparently from want of other occupation, he determined
to write a part of its annals.
The portion he chose was one very recent; that of the rebellion raised
by the Moors in 1568-1570, when they were no longer able to endure the
oppression of Philip the Second; and it is much to Mendoza’s honor,
that, with sympathies entirely Spanish, he has yet done the hated
enemies of his faith and people such generous justice, that his book
could not be published till many years after his own death,--not,
indeed, till the unhappy Moors themselves had been finally expelled
from Spain. His means for writing such a work were remarkable. His
father, as we have noticed, had been a general in the conquering
army of 1492, to which the story of this rebellion necessarily often
recurs, and had afterward been governor of Granada. One of his nephews
had commanded the troops in this very war. And now, after peace was
restored by the submission of the rebels, the old statesman, as he
stood amidst the trophies and ruins of the conflict, soon learned
from eyewitnesses and partisans whatever of interest had happened on
either side that he had not himself seen. Familiar, therefore, with
every thing of which he speaks, there is a freshness and power in his
sketches that carry us at once into the midst of the scenes and events
he describes, and make us sympathize in details too minute to be always
interesting, if they were not always marked with the impress of a
living reality.[821]
[821] The first edition of the “Guerra de Granada” is of Madrid,
1610, 4to; but it is incomplete. The first complete edition is
the beautiful one by Monfort (Valencia, 1776, 4to); since which
there have been several others.
But though his history springs, as it were, vigorously from the
very soil to which it relates, it is a sedulous and well-considered
imitation of the ancient masters, and entirely unlike the chronicling
spirit of the preceding period. The genius of antiquity, indeed, is
announced in its first sentence.
“My purpose,” says the old soldier, “is to record that war of Granada
which the Catholic King of Spain, Don Philip the Second, son of the
unconquered Emperor Don Charles, maintained in the kingdom of Granada,
against the newly converted rebels; a part whereof I saw, and a part
heard from persons who carried it on by their arms and by their
counsels.”
Sallust was undoubtedly Mendoza’s model. Like the War against Catiline,
the War of the Moorish Insurrection is a small work, and like that,
too, its style is generally rich and bold. But sometimes long passages
are evidently imitated from Tacitus, whose vigor and severity the
wise diplomatist seems to approach as nearly as he does the more
exuberant style of his prevalent master. Some of these imitations
are as happy, perhaps, as any that can be produced from the class to
which they belong; for they are often no less unconstrained than if
they were quite original. Take, for instance, the following passage,
which has often been noticed for its spirit and feeling, but which is
partly a translation from the account given by Tacitus, in his most
picturesque and condensed manner, of the visit made by Germanicus and
his army to the spot where lay, unburied, the remains of the three
legions of Varus, in the forests of Germany, and of the funeral honors
that army paid to the memory of their fallen and almost forgotten
countrymen;--the circumstance described by the Spanish historian being
so remarkably similar to that given in the Annals of Tacitus, that the
imitation is perfectly natural.[822]
[822] The passage in Tacitus is Annales, Lib. I. c. 61, 62; and
the imitation in Mendoza is Book IV. ed. 1776, pp. 300-302.
During a rebellion of the Moors in 1500-1501, it was thought of
consequence to destroy a fort in the mountains that lay towards Málaga.
The service was dangerous, and none came forward to undertake it,
until Alonso de Aguilar, one of the principal nobles in the service
of Ferdinand and Isabella, offered himself for the enterprise. His
attempt, as had been foreseen, failed, and hardly a man survived
to relate the details of the disaster; but Aguilar’s enthusiasm
and self-devotion created a great sensation at the time, and were
afterwards recorded in more than one of the old ballads of the
country.[823]
[823] The accounts may be found in Mariana, (Lib. XXVII. c. 5,)
and at the end of Hita, “Guerras de Granada,” where two of the
ballads are inserted.
At the period, however, when Mendoza touches on this unhappy defeat,
nearly seventy years had elapsed, and the bones of both Spaniards and
Moors still lay whitening on the spot where they had fallen. The war
between the two races was again renewed by the insurrection of the
conquered; a military expedition was again undertaken into the same
mountains; and the Duke of Arcos, its leader, was a lineal descendant
of some who had fallen there, and intimately connected with the family
of Alonso de Aguilar himself. While, therefore, the troops for this
expedition were collecting, the Duke, from a natural curiosity and
interest in what so nearly concerned him, took a small body of soldiers
and visited the melancholy spot.
“The Duke left Casares,” says Mendoza, “examining and securing the
passes of the mountains as he went; a needful providence, on account of
the little certainty there is of success in all military adventures.
They then began to ascend the range of heights where it was said the
bodies had remained unburied, melancholy and loathsome alike to the
sight and the memory.[824] For there were among those who now visited
it both kinsmen and descendants of the slain, or men who knew by
report whatever related to the sad scene. And first they came to the
spot where the vanguard had stopped with its leader, in consequence
of the darkness of the night; a broad opening between the foot of the
mountain and the Moorish fortress, without defence of any sort but such
as was afforded by the nature of the place. Here lay human skulls and
the bones of horses, heaped confusedly together or scattered about,
just as they had chanced to fall, mingled with fragments of arms and
bridles and the rich trappings of the cavalry.[825] Farther on, they
found the fort of the enemy, of which there were now only a few low
remains, nearly levelled with the surface of the soil. And then they
went forward, talking about the places where officers, leaders, and
common soldiers had perished together; relating how and where those
who survived had been saved, among whom were the Count of Ureña and
Pedro de Aguilar, elder son of Don Alonso; speaking of the spot where
Don Alonso had retired and defended himself between two rocks; the
wound the Moorish captain first gave him on the head, and then another
in the breast as he fell; the words he uttered as they closed in the
fight, ‘I am Don Alonso,’ and the answer of the chieftain as he struck
him down, ‘You are Don Alonso, but I am the chieftain of Benastepár’;
and of the wounds Don Alonso gave, which were not fatal, as were those
he received. They remembered, too, how friends and enemies had alike
mourned his fate; and now, on that same spot, the same sorrow was
renewed by the soldiers,--a race sparing of its gratitude, except in
tears. The general commanded a service to be performed for the dead;
and the soldiers present offered up prayers that they might rest in
peace, uncertain whether they interceded for their kinsmen or for their
enemies,--a feeling which increased their rage and the eagerness they
felt for finding those upon whom they could now take vengeance.”[826]
[824] “Incedunt,” says Tacitus, “mœstos locos, visuque ac memoriâ
deformes.”
[825] “Medio campi albentia ossa, ut fugerant, ut restiterant,
disjecta vel aggerata; adjacebant fragmina telorum, equorumque
artus, simul truncis arborum antefixa ora.”
[826] “Igitur Romanus, qui aderat, exercitus, sextum post cladis
annum, trium legionum ossa, nullo noscente alienas reliquias an
suorum humo tegeret, omnes, ut conjunctos ut consanguineos, auctâ
in hostem irâ, mœsti simul et infensi condebant.”
There are several instances like this, in the course of the work,
that show how well pleased Mendoza was to step aside into an episode
and indulge himself in appropriate ornaments of his subject. The main
direction of his story, however, is never unnaturally deviated from;
and wherever he goes, he is almost always powerful and effective.
Take, for example, the following speech of El Zaguer, one of the
principal conspirators, exciting his countrymen to break out into
open rebellion, by exposing to them the long series of affronts and
cruelties they had suffered from their Spanish oppressors. It reminds
us of the speeches of the indignant Carthaginian leaders in Livy.
“Seeing,” says the historian, “that the greatness of the undertaking
brought with it hesitation, delays, and exposure to accident and change
of opinion, this conspirator collected the principal men together
in the house of Zinzan in the Albaycin, and addressed them, setting
forth the oppression they had constantly endured, at the hands both of
public officers and private persons, till they were become, he said,
no less slaves than if they had been formally made such,--their wives,
children, estates, and even their own persons, being in the power and
at the mercy of their enemies, without the hope of seeing themselves
freed from such servitude for centuries,--exposed to as many tyrants
as they had neighbours, and suffering constantly new impositions and
new taxes,--deprived of the right of sanctuary in places where those
take refuge who, through accident or (what is deemed among them the
more justifiable cause) through revenge, commit crime,--thrust out
from the protection of the very churches at whose religious rites we
are yet required, under severe penalties, to be present,--subjected to
the priests to enrich them, and yet held to be unworthy of favor from
God or men,--treated and regarded as Moors among Christians, that we
may be despised, and as Christians among Moors, that we may neither
be believed nor consoled. ‘They have excluded us, too,’ he went on,
‘from life and human intercourse; for they forbid us to speak our own
language, and we do not understand theirs. In what way, then, are we to
communicate with others, or ask or give what life requires,--cut off
from the conversation of men, and denied what is not denied even to the
brutes? And yet may not he who speaks Castilian still hold to the law
of the Prophet, and may not he who speaks Moorish hold to the law of
Jesus? They force our children into their religious houses and schools,
and teach them arts which our fathers forbade us to learn, lest the
purity of our own law should be corrupted, and its very truth be made
a subject of doubt and quarrels. They threaten, too, to tear these our
children from the arms of their mothers and the protection of their
fathers, and send them into foreign lands, where they shall forget
our manners, and become the enemies of those to whom they owe their
existence. They command us to change our dress and wear clothes like
the Castilians. Yet among themselves the Germans dress in one fashion,
the French in another, and the Greeks in another; their friars, too,
and their young men, and their old men, have all separate costumes;
each nation, each profession, each class, has its own peculiar dress,
and still all are Christians;--while we--we Moors--are not to be
allowed to dress like Moors, as if we wore our faith in our raiment and
not in our hearts.’”[827]
[827] The speech of El Zaguer is in the first book of the History.
This is certainly picturesque; and so is the greater part of the whole
history, both from its subject and from the manner in which it is
treated. Nor is it lacking in dignity and elevation. Its style is bold
and abrupt, but true to the idiom of the language; and the current of
thought is deep and strong, easily carrying the reader onward with its
flood. Nothing in the old chronicling style of the earlier period is
to be compared to it, and little in any subsequent period is equal to
it for manliness, vigor, and truth.[828]
[828] There are some acute remarks on the style of Mendoza in the
Preface to Garces, “Vigor y Elegancia de la Lengua Castellana,”
Madrid, 1791, 4to, Tom. II.
The War of Granada is the last literary labor its author undertook. He
was, indeed, above seventy years old when he finished it; and, perhaps
to signify that he now renounced the career of letters, he collected
his library, both the classics and manuscripts he had procured with
so much trouble in Italy and Greece, and the curious Arabic works he
had found in Granada, and presented the whole to his severe sovereign
for his favorite establishment of the Escurial, among whose untold
treasures they still hold a prominent place. At any rate, after this,
we hear nothing of the old statesman, except that, for some reason or
other, Philip the Second permitted him to come to court again; and
that, a few days after he arrived at Madrid, he was seized with a
violent illness, of which he died in April, 1575, seventy-two years
old.[829]
[829] Pleasant glimpses of the occupations and character of
Mendoza, during the last two years of his life, may be found
in several letters he wrote to Zurita, the historian, which
are preserved in Dormer, “Progresos de la Historia de Aragon”
(Zaragoza, 1680, folio, pp. 501, etc.). The way in which he
announces his intention of giving his books to the Escurial
Library, in a letter, dated at Granada, 1 Dec., 1573, is very
characteristic: “I keep collecting my books and sending them
to Alcalá, because the late Doctor Velasco wrote me word, that
his Majesty would be pleased to see them, and perhaps put them
in the Escurial. And I think he is right; for as it is the most
sumptuous building of ancient or modern times, that I have seen,
so I think that nothing should be wanting in it, and that it
ought to contain the most sumptuous library in the world.” In
another, a few months only before his death, he says, “I go on
dusting my books and examining them to see whether they are
injured by the rats, and am well pleased to find them in good
condition. Strange authors there are among them, of whom I have
no recollection; and I wonder I have learnt so little, when I
find how much I have read.” Letter of Nov. 18, 1574.
On whatever side we regard the character of Mendoza, we feel sure that
he was an extraordinary man; but the combination of his powers is,
after all, what is most to be wondered at. In all of them, however,
and especially in the union of a life of military adventure and active
interest in affairs with a sincere love of learning and elegant
letters, he showed himself to be a genuine Spaniard;--the elements of
greatness which his various fortunes had thus unfolded within him being
all among the elements of Spanish national poetry and eloquence, in
their best age and most generous development. The loyal old knight,
therefore, may well stand forward with those who, first in the order
of time, as well as of merit, are to constitute that final school of
Spanish literature which was built on the safe foundations of the
national genius and character, and can, therefore, never be shaken by
the floods or convulsions of the ages that may come after it.
CHAPTER V.
DIDACTIC POETRY.--LUIS DE ESCOBAR.--CORELAS.--TORRE.--DIDACTIC
PROSE.--VILLALOBOS.--OLIVA.--SEDEÑO.--SALAZAR.--LUIS MEXIA.--PEDRO
MEXIA.--NAVARRA.--URREA.--PALACIOS RUBIOS.--VANEGAS.--JUAN DE
AVILA.--ANTONIO DE GUEVARA.--DIÁLOGO DE LAS LENGUAS.--PROGRESS OF THE
CASTILIAN FROM THE TIME OF JOHN THE SECOND TO THAT OF THE EMPEROR
CHARLES THE FIFTH.
While an Italian spirit, or, at least, an observance of Italian forms,
was beginning so decidedly to prevail in Spanish lyric and pastoral
poetry, what was didactic, whether in prose or verse, took directions
somewhat different.
In didactic poetry, among other forms, the old one of question
and answer, known from the age of Juan de Mena, and found in the
Cancioneros as late as Badajoz, continued to enjoy much favor.
Originally, such questions seem to have been riddles and witticisms;
but in the sixteenth century they gradually assumed a graver
character, and at last claimed to be directly and absolutely didactic,
constituting a form in which two remarkable books of light and easy
verse were produced. The first of these books is called “The Four
Hundred Answers to as many Questions of the Illustrious Don Fadrique
Enriquez, the Admiral of Castile, and other Persons.” It was printed
three times in 1545, the year in which it first appeared, and had
undoubtedly a great success in the class of society to which it was
addressed, and whose manners and opinions it strikingly illustrates.
It contains at least twenty thousand verses, and was followed, in 1552,
by another similar volume, partly in prose, and promising a third,
which, however, was never published. Except five hundred proverbs,
as they are inappropriately called, at the end of the first volume,
and fifty glosses at the end of the second, the whole consists of
such ingenious questions as a distinguished old nobleman in the reign
of Charles the Fifth and his friends might imagine it would amuse
or instruct them to have solved. They are on subjects as various as
possible,--religion, morals, history, medicine, magic,--in short,
whatever could occur to idle and curious minds; but they were all sent
to an acute, good-humored Minorite friar, Luis de Escobar, who, being
bed-ridden with the gout and other grievous maladies, had nothing
better to do than to answer them.
His answers form the body of the work. Some of them are wise and some
foolish, some are learned and some absurd; but they all bear the
impression of their age. Once we have a long letter of advice about a
godly life, sent to the Admiral, which, no doubt, was well suited to
his case; and repeatedly we get complaints from the old monk himself
of his sufferings, and accounts of what he was doing; so that from
different parts of the two volumes it would be possible to collect a
tolerably distinct picture of the amusements of society, if not its
occupations, about the court, at the period when they were written.
The poetry is in many respects not unlike that of Tusser, who was
contemporary with Escobar, but it is better and more spirited.[830]
[830] Escobar complains that many of the questions sent to him
were in such bad verse, that it cost him a great deal of labor
to put them into a proper shape; and it must be admitted, that
both questions and answers generally read as if they came from
one hand. Sometimes a long moral dissertation occurs, especially
in the prose of the second volume, but the answers are rarely
tedious from their length. Those in the first volume are the
best, and Nos. 280, 281, 282, are curious, from the accounts
they contain of the poet himself, who must have died after 1552.
In the Preface to the first volume, he says the Admiral died
in 1538. If the whole work had been completed, according to
its author’s purpose, it would have contained just a thousand
questions and answers. For a specimen, we may take No. 10
(Quatrocientas Preguntas, Çaragoça, 1545, folio) as one of the
more ridiculous, where the Admiral asks how many keys Christ gave
to St. Peter, and No. 190 as one of the better sort, where the
Admiral asks, whether it be necessary to kneel before the priest
at confession, if the penitent finds it very painful; to which
the old monk answers gently and well,--
He that, through suffering sent from God above
Confessing, kneels not, still commits no sin;
But let him cherish modest, humble love,
And that shall purify his heart within.
The fifth part of the first volume consists of riddles in the old
style; and, as Escobar adds, they are sometimes truly very old
riddles; so old, that they must have been generally known. The
second volume was printed at Valladolid, 1552, and both are in
folio.
The second book of questions and answers to which we have referred is
graver than the first. It was printed the next year after the great
success of Escobar’s work, and is called “Three Hundred Questions
concerning Natural Subjects, with their Answers,” by Alonso Lopez de
Corelas, a physician, who had more learning, perhaps, than the monk he
imitated, but is less amusing, and writes in verses neither so well
constructed nor so agreeable.[831]
[831] The volume of Corelas’s “Trezientas Preguntas” (Valladolid,
1546, 4to) is accompanied by a learned prose commentary in a
respectable didactic style.
Others followed, like Gonzalez de la Torre, who in 1590 dedicated to
the heir-apparent of the Spanish throne a volume of such dull religious
riddles as were admired a century before.[832] But nobody, who wrote in
this peculiar didactic style of verse, equalled Escobar, and it soon
passed out of general notice and regard.[833]
[832] Docientas Preguntas, etc., por Juan Gonzalez de la Torre,
Madrid, 1590, 4to.
[833] I should rather have said, perhaps, that the Preguntas were
soon restricted to the fashionable societies and academies of the
time, as we see them wittily exhibited in the first _jornada_ of
Calderon’s “Secreto á voces.”
In prose, about the same time, a fashion appeared of imitating the
Roman didactic prose-writers, just as those writers had been imitated
by Castiglione, Bembo, Giovanni della Casa, and others in Italy.
The impulse seems plainly to have been communicated to Spain by the
moderns, and not by the ancients. It was because the Italians led the
way that the Romans were imitated, and not because the example of
Cicero and Seneca had, of itself, been able to form a prose school,
of any kind, beyond the Pyrenees.[834] The fashion was not one of so
much importance and influence as that introduced into the poetry of
the nation; but it is worthy of notice, both on account of its results
during the reign of Charles the Fifth, and on account of an effect
more or less distinct which it had on the prose style of the nation
afterwards.
[834] The general tendency and tone of the didactic prose-writers
in the reign of Charles V. prove this fact; but the Discourse
of Morales, the historian, prefixed to the works of his uncle,
Fernan Perez de Oliva, shows the way in which the change was
brought about. Some Spaniards, it is plain from this curious
document, were become ashamed to write any longer in Latin, as
if their own language were unfit for practical use in matters
of grave importance, when they had, in the Italian, examples of
entire success before them. Obras de Oliva, Madrid, 1787, 12mo,
Tom. I. pp. xvi.-xlvii.
The eldest among the prominent writers produced by this state of things
was Francisco de Villalobos, of whom we know little, except that he
belonged to a family which, for several successive generations, had
been devoted to the medical art; that he was himself the physician,
first of Ferdinand the Catholic,[835] and then of Charles the Fifth;
that he published, as early as 1498, a poem on his own science, in five
hundred stanzas, founded on the rules of Avicenna;[836] and that he
continued to be known as an author, chiefly on subjects connected with
his profession, till 1543, before which time he had become weary of the
court, and sought a voluntary retirement, where he died, above seventy
years old.[837] His translation of the “Amphitryon” of Plautus belongs
rather to the theatre, but, like that of Oliva, soon to be mentioned,
produced no effect there, and, like his scientific treatises, demands
no especial notice. The rest of his works, including all that belong to
the department of elegant literature, are to be found in a volume of
moderate size, which he dedicated to the Infante Don Luis of Portugal.
[835] There is a letter of Villalobos, dated at Calatayud, Oct.
6, 1515, in which he says he was detained in that city by the
king’s severe illness, (Obras, Çaragoça, 1544, folio, f. 71. b.)
This was the illness of which Ferdinand died in less than four
months afterward.
[836] Mendez, Typographía, p. 249. Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed.
Bayer, Tom. II. p. 344, note.
[837] He seems, from the letter just noticed, to have been
displeased with his position as early as 1515; but he must have
continued at court above twenty years longer, when he left it
poor and disheartened. (Obras, f. 45.) From a passage two leaves
farther on, I think he left it after the death of the Empress, in
1539.
The chief of them is called “Problems,” and is divided into two
tractates;--the first, which is very short, being on the Sun, the
Planets, the Four Elements, and the Terrestrial Paradise; and the last,
which is longer, on Man and Morals, beginning with an essay on Satan,
and ending with one on Flattery and Flatterers, which is especially
addressed to the heir-apparent of the crown of Spain, afterwards Philip
the Second. Each of these subdivisions, in each tractate, has eight
lines of the old Spanish verse prefixed to it, as its Problem, or text,
and the prose discussion which follows, like a gloss, constitutes the
substance of the work. The whole is of a very miscellaneous character;
most of it grave, like the essays on Knights and Prelates, but some of
it amusing, like an essay on the Marriage of Old Men.[838] The best
portions are those that have a satirical vein in them; such as the
ridicule of litigious old men, and of old men that wear paint.[839]
[838] If Poggio’s trifle, “An Seni sit Uxor ducenda,” had been
_published_ when Villalobos wrote, I should not doubt he had seen
it. As it is, the coincidence may not be accidental, for Poggio
died in 1449, though his Dialogue was not, I believe, printed
till the present century.
[839] The Problemas constitute the first part of the Obras de
Villalobos, 1544, and fill 34 leaves.
A Dialogue on Intermittent Fevers, a Dialogue on the Natural Heat of
the Body, and a Dialogue between the Doctor and the Duke, his patient,
are all quite in the manner of the contemporary didactic discussions
of the Italians, except that the last contains passages of a broad and
free humor, approaching more nearly to the tone of comedy, or rather
of farce.[840] A treatise that follows, on the Three Great Annoyances
of much talking, much disputing, and much laughing,[841] and a grave
discourse on Love, with which the volume ends, are all that remain
worth notice. They have the same general characteristics with the
rest of his miscellanies; the style of some portions of them being
distinguished by more purity and more pretensions to dignity than have
been found in the earlier didactic prose-writers, and especially by
greater clearness and exactness of expression. Occasionally, too, we
meet with an idiomatic familiarity, frankness, and spirit that are
very attractive, and that partly compensate us for the absurdities of
the old and forgotten doctrines in natural history and medicine, which
Villalobos inculcated because they were the received doctrines of his
time.
[840] Obras, f. 35.
[841] I have translated the title of this Treatise “The Three
Great _Annoyances_.” In the original it is “The Three Great ----,”
leaving the title, says Villalobos in his Prólogo, unfinished, so
that every body may fill it up as he likes.
The next writer of the same class, and, on the whole, one much more
worthy of consideration, is Fernan Perez de Oliva, a Cordovese, who was
born about 1492, and died, still young, in 1530. His father was a lover
of letters; and the son, as he himself informs us, was educated with
care from his earliest youth. At twelve years of age, he was already
a student in the University of Salamanca; after which he went, first,
to Alcalá, when it was in the beginning of its glory; then to Paris,
whose University had long attracted students from every part of Europe;
and finally to Rome, where, under the protection of an uncle at the
court of Leo the Tenth, all the advantages to be found in the most
cultivated capital of Christendom were accessible to him.
On his uncle’s death, it was proposed to him to take the offices left
vacant by that event; but, loving letters more than courtly honors, he
went back to Paris, where he taught and lectured in its University for
three years. Another Pope, Adrian the Sixth, was now on the throne,
and, hearing of Oliva’s success, endeavoured anew to draw him to Rome;
but the love of his country and of literature continued to be stronger
than the love of ecclesiastical preferment. He returned, therefore, to
Salamanca; became one of the original members of the rich “College of
the Archbishop,” founded in 1528; and was successively chosen Professor
of Ethics in the University, and its Rector. But he had hardly risen to
his highest distinctions, when he died suddenly, and at a moment when
so many hopes rested on him, that his death was felt as a misfortune to
the cause of letters throughout Spain.[842]
[842] The most ample life of Oliva is in Rezabal y Ugarte,
“Biblioteca de los Escritores, que han sido individuos de los
seis Colegios Mayores” (Madrid, 1805, 4to, pp. 239, etc.). But
all that we know about him, of any real interest, is to be
found in the exposition he made of his claims and merits when
he contended publicly for the chair of Moral Philosophy at
Salamanca. (Obras, 1787, Tom. II. pp. 26-51.) In the course of
it, he says his travels all over Spain and out of it, in pursuit
of knowledge, had amounted to more than three thousand leagues.
Oliva’s studies at Rome had taught him how successfully the Latin
writers had been imitated by the Italians, and he became anxious that
they should be no less successfully imitated by the Spaniards. He felt
it as a wrong done to his native language, that almost all serious
prose discussions in Spain were still carried on in Latin rather than
in Spanish.[843] Taking a hint, then, from Castiglione’s “Cortigiano,”
and opposing the current of opinion among the learned men with whom
he lived and acted, he began a didactic dialogue on the Dignity of
Man, formally defending it as a work in the Spanish language written
by a Spaniard. Besides this, he wrote several strictly didactic
discourses;--one on the Faculties of the Mind and their Proper Use;
another urging Córdova, his native city, to improve the navigation of
the Guadalquivir, and so obtain a portion of the rich commerce of the
Indies, which was then monopolized by Seville; and another, that was
delivered at Salamanca, when he was a candidate for the chair of moral
philosophy;--in all which his nephew, Morales, the historian, assures
us it was his uncle’s strong desire to furnish practical examples of
the power and resources of the Spanish language.[844]
[843] Obras, Tom. I. p. xxiii.
[844] The works of Oliva have been published at least twice, the
first time by his nephew, Ambrosio de Morales, 4to, Córdova,
in 1585, and again at Madrid, 1787, 2 vols. 12mo. In the Index
Expurgatorius, (1667, p. 424,) they are forbidden to be read,
“till they are corrected,”--a phrase which seems to have left
each copy of them to the discretion of the spiritual director
of its owner. In the edition of 1787, a sheet was cancelled, in
order to get rid of a note of Morales. See Index of 1790.
In the same volume with the minor works of Oliva, Morales
published fifteen moral discourses of his own, and one by Pedro
Valles of Córdova, none of which have much literary value, though
several, like one on the Advantage of Teaching with Gentleness,
and one on the Difference between Genius and Wisdom, are marked
with excellent sense. That of Valles is on the Fear of Death.
The purpose of giving greater dignity to his native tongue, by
employing it, instead of the Latin, on all the chief subjects of
human inquiry, was certainly a fortunate one in Oliva, and soon found
imitators. Juan de Sedeño published, in 1536, two prose dialogues
on Love and one on Happiness; the former in a more graceful tone of
gallantry, and the latter in a more philosophical spirit and with more
terseness of manner, than belonged to the age.[845] Francisco Cervantes
de Salazar, a man of learning, completed the dialogue of Oliva on the
Dignity of Man, which had been left unfinished, and, dedicating it
to Fernando Cortés, published it in 1546,[846] together with a long
prose fable by Luis Mexia, on Idleness and Labor, written in a pure
and somewhat elevated style, but too much indebted to the “Vision” of
the Bachiller de la Torre.[847] Pedro de Navarra published, in 1567,
forty Moral Dialogues, partly the result of conversations held in an
_Academia_ of distinguished persons, who met, from time to time, at
the house of Fernando Cortés.[848] Pedro Mexia, the chronicler, wrote
a Silva, or Miscellany, divided, in the later editions, into six
books, and subdivided into a multitude of separate essays, historical
and moral; declaring it to be the first work of the kind in Spanish,
which, he says, he considers quite as suitable for such discussions
as the Italian.[849] To this, which may be regarded as an imitation
of Macrobius or of Athenæus, and which was printed in 1543, he added,
in 1547, six didactic dialogues,--curious, but of little value,--in
the first of which the advantages and disadvantages of having regular
physicians are agreeably set forth, with a lightness and exactness of
style hardly to have been expected.[850] And finally, to complete the
short list, Urrea, a favored soldier of the Emperor, and at one time
viceroy of Apulia,--the same person who made the poor translation of
Ariosto mentioned in Don Quixote,--published, in 1566, a Dialogue on
True Military Honor, which is written in a pleasant and easy style, and
contains, mingled with the notions of one who says he trained himself
for glory by reading romances of chivalry, not a few amusing anecdotes
of duels and military adventures.[851]
[845] Siguense dos Coloquios de Amores y otro de Bienaventurança,
etc., por Juan de Sedeño, vezino de Arevalo, 1536, sm. 4to, no
printer or place, pp. 16. This is the same Juan de Sedeño who
translated the “Celestina” into verse in 1540, and who wrote
the “Suma de Varones Ilustres” (Arevalo, 1551, and Toledo,
1590, folio);--a poor biographical dictionary, containing lives
of about two hundred distinguished personages, alphabetically
arranged, and beginning with Adam. Sedeño was a soldier, and
served in Italy.
[846] The whole Dialogue--both the part written by Oliva and that
written by Francisco Cervantes--was published at Madrid (1772,
4to) in a new edition by Cerdá y Rico, with his usual abundant,
but awkward, prefaces and annotations.
[847] It is republished in the volume mentioned in the last note;
but we know nothing of its author.
[848] Diálogos muy Subtiles y Notables, etc., por D. Pedro de
Navarra, Obispo de Comenge, Çaragoça, 1567, 12mo, 118 leaves.
The first five Dialogues are on the Character becoming a Royal
Chronicler; the next four on the Differences between a Rustic and
a Noble Life; and the remaining thirty-one on Preparation for
Death;--all written in a pure, simple Castilian style, but with
little either new or striking in the thoughts. Their author says,
it was a rule of the _Academia_, that the person who arrived
last at each meeting should furnish a subject for discussion,
and direct another member to reduce to writing the remarks
that might be made on it,--Cardinal Poggio, Juan d’Estuñiga,
knight-commander of Castile, and other persons of note, being
of the society. Navarra adds, that he had written two hundred
dialogues, in which there were “few matters that had not been
touched upon in that excellent Academy,” and notes especially,
that the subject of Preparation for Death had been discussed
after the decease of Cobos, a confidential minister of Charles
V., and that he himself had acted as secretary on the occasion.
Traces of any thing contemporary are, however, rare in the forty
dialogues he printed;--the most important that I have noticed
relating to Charles V. and his retirement at San Yuste, which the
good Bishop seems to have believed was a sincere abandonment of
all worldly thoughts and passions. I find nothing to illustrate
the character of Cortés, except the fact that such meetings were
held at his house.
[849] Silva de Varia Leccion, por Pedro Mexia. The first edition
(Sevilla, 1543, fol., lit. got., 144 leaves) is in only three
parts. Another, which I also possess, is of Madrid, 1669, and
in six books, filling about 700 closely printed quarto pages.
It was long very popular, and there are many editions of it,
besides translations into Italian, German, French, Flemish, and
English. One English version is by Thomas Fortescue, and appeared
in 1571. (Warton’s Eng. Poetry, London, 1824, 8vo, Tom. IV. p.
312.) Another, which is anonymous, is called “The Treasure of
Ancient and Modern Times, etc., translated out of that worthy
Spanish Gentleman, Pedro Mexia, and Mr. Francisco Sansovino, the
Italian,” etc. (London, 1613, fol.). It is a curious mixture of
similar discussions by different authors, Spanish, Italian, and
French. Mexia’s part begins at Book I. c. 8.
[850] The earliest edition of the Dialogues, I think, is that of
Seville, 1547, 8vo. The one I use is in 12mo, and was printed at
Seville, 1562, black letter, 167 leaves. The second dialogue,
which is on Inviting to Feasts, is amusing; but the last, which
is on subjects of physical science, such as the causes of
thunder, earthquakes, and comets, is now-a-days only curious or
ridiculous. At the end of the Dialogues, and sometimes at the
end of old editions of the Silva, is found a free translation of
the Exhortation to Virtue by Isocrates, made from the Latin of
Agricola, because Mexia did not understand Greek. It is of no
value.
[851] Diálogo de la Verdadera Honra Militar, por Gerónimo Ximenez
de Urrea. There are editions of 1566, 1575, 1661, etc. (Latassa,
Bib. Arag. Nueva, Tom. I. p. 264.) Mine is a small quarto
volume, Zaragoza, 1642. One of the most amusing passages in the
Dialogue of Urrea is the one in Part First, containing a detailed
statement of every thing relating to the duel proposed by Francis
I. to Charles V.
Both of the works of Pedro Mexia, but especially his Silva, enjoyed no
little popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and,
in point of style, they are certainly not without merit. None, however,
of the productions of any one of the authors last mentioned had so much
force and character as the first part of the Dialogue on the Dignity
of Man. And yet Oliva was certainly not a person of a commanding
genius. His imagination never warms into poetry; his invention is never
sufficient to give new and strong views to his subject; and his system
of imitating both the Latin and the Italian masters rather tends to
debilitate than to impart vigor to his thoughts. But there is a general
reasonableness and wisdom in what he says that win and often satisfy
us, and these, with his style, which, though sometimes declamatory,
is yet, on the whole, pure and well settled, and his happy idea of
defending and employing the Castilian, then coming into all its rights
as a living language, have had the effect of giving him a more lasting
reputation than that of any other Spanish prose-writer of his time.[852]
[852] As late as 1592, when the “Conversion de la Magdalena,” by
Pedro Malon de Chaide was published, the opposition to the use of
the Castilian in grave subjects was continued. He says, people
talked to him as if it were “a sacrilege” to discuss such matters
except in Latin. (f. 15.) But he replies, like a true Spaniard,
that the Castilian is better for such purposes than Latin or
Greek, and that he trusts before long to see it as widely spread
as the arms and glories of his country. (f. 17.)
The same general tendency to a more formal and elegant style of
discussion is found in a few other ethical and religious authors of the
reign of Charles the Fifth that are still remembered; such as Palacios
Rubios, who wrote an essay on Military Courage, for the benefit of
his son;[853] Vanegas, who, under the title of “The Agony of Passing
through Death,” gives us what may rather be considered an ascetic
treatise on holy living;[854] and Juan de Avila, sometimes called the
Apostle of Andalusia, whose letters are fervent exhortations to virtue
and religion, composed with care and often with eloquence, if not with
entire purity of style.[855]
[853] A full account of Juan Lopez de Vivero Palacios Rubios,
who was a man of consequence in his time, and engaged in the
famous compilation of the Spanish laws called “Leyes de Toro,”
is contained in Rezabal y Ugarte (Biblioteca, pp. 266-271). His
works in Latin are numerous; but in Spanish he published only
“Del Esfuerzo Belico Heroyco,” which appeared first at Salamanca
in 1524, folio, but of which there is a beautiful Madrid edition,
1793, folio, with notes by Francisco Morales.
[854] Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 8. He flourished about
1531-45. His “Agonía del Tránsito de la Muerte,” a glossary to
which, by its author, is dated 1543, was first printed from his
corrected manuscript, many years later. My copy, which seems
to be of the first edition, is dated Alcalá, 1574, and is in
12mo. The treatise called “Diferencias de Libros que ay en el
Universo,” by the same author, who, however, here writes his name
V_e_negas, was finished in 1539, and printed at Toledo in 1540,
4to. It is written in a good style, though not without conceits
of thought, and conceited phrases. But it is not, as its title
might seem to imply, a criticism on books and authors, but the
opinion of Vanegas himself, how we should study the great books
of God, nature, man, and Christianity. It is, in fact, intended
to discourage the reading of books then much in fashion, and
deemed by him bad.
[855] He died in 1569. In 1534 he was in the prisons of the
Inquisition, and in 1559 one of his books was put into the Index
Expurgatorius. Nevertheless, he was regarded as a sort of Saint.
(Llorente, Histoire de l’Inquisition, Tom. II. pp. 7 and 423.)
His “Cartas Espirituales” were not printed, I believe, till the
year of his death. (Antonio, Bib. Nova, Tom. I. pp. 639-642.) His
treatises on Self-knowledge, on Prayer, and on other religious
subjects, are equally well written, and in the same style of
eloquence. A long life, or rather eulogy, of him is prefixed to
the first volume of his works, (Madrid, 1595, 4to,) by Juan Diaz.
The author in this class, however, who during his lifetime had the
most influence was Antonio de Guevara, one of the official chroniclers
of Charles the Fifth. He was a Biscayan by birth, and passed some of
his earlier years at the court of Queen Isabella. In 1528 he became a
Franciscan monk, but, enjoying the favor of the Emperor, he seems to
have been transformed into a thorough courtier, accompanying his master
during his journeys and residences in Italy and other parts of Europe,
and rising successively, by the royal patronage, to be court preacher,
Imperial historiographer, Bishop of Guadix, and Bishop of Mondoñedo.
He died in 1545.[856]
[856] A life of Guevara is prefixed to the edition of his
Epístolas, Madrid, 1673, 4to; but there is a good account of him
by himself in the Prólogo to his “Menosprecio de Corte.”
His works were not numerous, but they were fitted to the atmosphere in
which they were produced and enjoyed at once a great popularity. His
“Dial for Princes, or Marcus Aurelius,” first published in 1529, and
the fruit, as he tells us, of eleven years’ labor,[857] was not only
often reprinted in Spanish, but was translated into Latin, Italian,
French, and English; in each of which last two languages it appeared
many times before the end of the century.[858] It is a kind of romance,
founded on the life and character of Marcus Aurelius, and resembles, in
some points, the “Cyropædia” of Xenophon; its purpose being to place
before the Emperor Charles the Fifth the model of a prince more perfect
for wisdom and virtue than any other of antiquity. But the Bishop of
Mondoñedo adventured beyond his prerogative. He pretended that his
Marcus Aurelius was genuine history, and appealed to a manuscript in
Florence, which did not exist, as if he had done little more than make
a translation of it. In consequence of this, Pedro de Rua, a professor
of elegant literature in the college at Soria, addressed a letter to
him, in 1540, exposing the fraud. Two other letters followed, written
with more freedom and purity of style than any thing in the works
of the Bishop himself, and leaving him no real ground on which to
stand.[859] He, however, defended himself as well as he was able; at
first cautiously, but afterwards, when he was more closely assailed,
by assuming the wholly untenable position, that all ancient profane
history was no more true than his romance of Marcus Aurelius, and that
he had as good a right to invent for his own high purposes as Herodotus
or Livy. From this time he was severely attacked; more so, perhaps,
than he would have been, if the gross frauds of Annius of Viterbo had
not then been recent. But however this may be, it was done with a
bitterness that forms a strong contrast to the applause bestowed in
France, near the end of the eighteenth century, upon a somewhat similar
work on the same subject by Thomas.[860]
[857] See the argument to the “Década de los Césares.”
[858] Watt, in his “Bibliotheca Britannica,” and Brunet, in his
“Manuel du Libraire,” give quite curious lists of the different
editions and translations of the works of Guevara, showing their
great popularity all over Europe. In French, the number of
translations in the sixteenth century was extraordinary. See La
Croix du Maine et du Verdier, Bibliothèques, (Paris, 1772, 4to,
Tom. III. p. 123,) and the articles there referred to.
[859] There are editions of the Cartas del Bachiller Rua, Burgos,
1549, 4to, and Madrid, 1736, 4to, and a life of him in Bayle,
Dict. Historique, Amsterdam, 1740, folio, Tom. IV. p. 95. The
letters of Rua, or Rhua, as his name is often written, are
respectable in style, though their critical spirit is that of the
age and country in which they were written. The short reply of
Guevara following the second of Rua’s letters is not creditable
to him.
[860] Antonio, in his article on Guevara, (Bib. Nova, Tom. I. p.
125,) is very severe; but his tone is gentle, compared with that
of Bayle, (Dict. Hist., Tom. II. p. 631,) who always delights to
show up any defects he can find in the characters of priests and
monks. There are editions of the Relox de Principes, of 1529,
1532, 1537, etc.
After all, however, the “Dial for Princes” is little worthy of the
excitement it occasioned. It is filled with letters and speeches ill
conceived and inappropriate; and is written in a formal and inflated
style. Perhaps we are now indebted to it for nothing so much as for the
beautiful fable of “The Peasant of the Danube,” evidently suggested to
La Fontaine by one of the discourses through which Guevara endeavoured
to give life and reality to his fictions.[861]
[861] La Fontaine, Fables, Lib. XI. fab. 7, and Guevara, Relox,
Lib. III. c. 3. The speech which the Spanish Bishop, the true
inventor of this happy fiction, gives to his Rústico de Germania
is, indeed, too long; but it was popular. Tirso de Molina, after
describing a peasant who approached Xerxes, says in the Prologue
to one of his plays,--
In short,
He represented to the very life
The Rustic that so boldly spoke
Before the Roman Senate.
Cigarrales de Toledo, Madrid, 1624, 4to, p. 102
La Fontaine, however, did not trouble himself about the original
Spanish or its popularity. He took his beautiful version of the
fable from an old French translation, made by a gentleman who
went to Madrid in 1526 with the Cardinal de Grammont, on the
subject of Francis the First’s imprisonment. It is in the rich
old French of that period, and La Fontaine often adopts, with his
accustomed skill, its picturesque phraseology. I suppose this
translation is the one cited by Brunet as made by René Bertaut,
of which there were many editions. Mine is of Paris, 1540,
folio, by Galliot du Pré, and is entitled “Lorloge des Princes,
traduict Despaignol en Langaige François”; but does not give the
translator’s name.
In the same spirit, though with less boldness, he wrote his “Lives of
the Ten Roman Emperors”; a work which, like his Dial for Princes, he
dedicated to Charles the Fifth. In general, he has here followed the
authorities on which he claims to found his narrative, such as Dion
Cassius and the minor Latin historians, showing, at the same time, a
marked desire to imitate Plutarch and Suetonius, whom he announces as
his models. But he has not been able entirely to resist the temptation
of inserting fictitious letters, and even unfounded stories; thus
giving a false view, if not of the facts of history, at least of some
of the characters he records. His style, however, though it still wants
purity and appropriateness, is better and more simple than it is in his
romance on Marcus Aurelius.[862]
[862] The “Década de los Césares,” with the other treatises of
Guevara here spoken of, except his Epistles, are to be found in
a collection of his works first printed at Valladolid in 1539.
My copy is of the second edition, Valladolid, 1545, folio, black
letter, 214 leaves.
Similar characteristics mark a large collection of Letters printed by
him as early as 1539. Many of them are addressed to persons of great
consideration in his time, such as the Marquis of Pescara, the Duke
of Alva, Iñigo de Velasco, Grand Constable of Castile, and Fadrique
Enriquez, Grand Admiral. But some were evidently never sent to the
persons addressed, like the loyal one to Juan de Padilla, the head
of the _Comuneros_, and two impertinent letters to the Governor Luis
Bravo, who had foolishly fallen in love in his old age. Others are
mere fictions; among which are a correspondence of the Emperor Trajan
with Plutarch and the Roman Senate, which Guevara vainly protests
he translated from the Greek, without saying where he found the
originals,[863] and a long epistle about Laïs and other courtesans of
antiquity, in which he gives the details of their conversations as if
he had listened to them himself. Most of the letters, though they are
called “Familiar Epistles,” are merely essays or disputations, and
a few are sermons in form, with an announcement of the occasions on
which they were preached. None has the easy or natural air of a real
correspondence. In fact, they were all, no doubt, prepared expressly
for publication and for effect; and, notwithstanding their stiffness
and formality, were greatly admired. They were often printed in Spain;
they were translated into all the principal languages of Europe; and,
to express the value set on them, they were generally called “The
Golden Epistles.” But notwithstanding their early success, they have
long been disregarded, and only a few passages that touch the affairs
of the time or the life of the Emperor can now be read with interest or
pleasure.[864]
[863] These very letters, however, were thought worth translating
into English by Sir Geoffrey Fenton, and are found ff. 68-77 of
a curious collection taken from different authors and published
in London, (1575, 4to, black letter,) under the title of “Golden
Epistles.” Edward Hellowes had already translated the whole of
Guevara’s Epistles in 1574; which were again translated, but not
very well, by Savage, in 1657.
[864] Epístolas Familiares de D. Antonio de Guevara, Madrid,
1673, 4to p. 12, and elsewhere. Cervantes, _en passant_, gives a
blow at the letter of Guevara about Laïs, in the Prólogo to the
first part of his Don Quixote.
Besides these works, Guevara wrote several formal treatises. Two are
strictly theological.[865] Another is on the Inventors of the Art of
Navigation and its Practice;--a subject which might be thought foreign
from the Bishop’s experience, but with which, he tells us, he had
become familiar by having been much at sea, and visited many ports on
the Mediterranean.[866] Of his two other treatises, which are all that
remain to be noticed, one is called “Contempt of Court Life and Praise
of the Country”; and the other, “Counsels for Favorites, and Teachings
for Courtiers.” They are moral discussions, suggested by Castiglione’s
“Courtier,” then at the height of its popularity, and are written with
great elaborateness, in a solemn and stiff style, bearing the same
relations to truth and wisdom that Arcadian pastorals do to nature.[867]
[865] One of these religious treatises is entitled “Monte
Calvario,” 1542, translated into English in 1595; and the other,
“Oratorio de Religiosos,” 1543, which is a series of short
exhortations or homilies with a text prefixed to each. The first
is ordered to be expurgated in the Index of 1667, (p. 67,) and
both are censured in that of 1790.
[866] Hellowes translated this, also, and printed it in 1578.
(Sir E. Brydges, Censura Literaria, Tom. III. 1807, p. 210.) It
is an unpromising subject in any language, but in the original
Guevara has shown some pleasantry, and an easier style than is
common with him.
[867] Both these treatises were translated into English; the
first by Sir Francis Briant, in 1548. Ames’s Typog. Antiquities,
ed. Dibdin, London, 1810, 4to, Tom. III. p. 460.
All the works of Guevara show the impress of their age, and mark their
author’s position at court. They are burdened with learning, yet not
without proofs of experience in the ways of the world;--they often show
good sense, but they are monotonous from the stately dignity he thinks
it necessary to assume on his own account, and from the rhetorical
ornament by which he hopes to commend them to the regard of his
readers. Such as they are, however, they illustrate and exemplify, more
truly, perhaps, than any thing else of their age, the style of writing
most in favor at the court of Charles the Fifth, especially during the
latter part of that monarch’s reign.
But by far the best didactic prose work of this period, though unknown
and unpublished till two centuries afterwards, is that commonly cited
under the simple title of “The Dialogue on Languages”;--a work which,
at any time, would be deemed remarkable for the naturalness and purity
of its style, and is peculiarly so at this period of formal and
elaborate eloquence. “I write,” says its author, “as I speak; only
I take more pains to think what I have to say, and then I say it as
simply as I can; for, to my mind, affectation is out of place in all
languages.” Who it was that entertained an opinion so true, but in
his time so uncommon, is not certain. Probably it was Juan Valdés, a
person who enjoys the distinction of being one of the first Spaniards
that embraced the opinions of the Reformation, and the very first who
made an effort to spread them. He was educated at the University of
Alcalá, and during a part of his life possessed not a little political
consequence, being much about the person of the Emperor, and sent by
him to act as secretary and adviser to Toledo, the great viceroy of
Naples. It is not known what became of him afterwards; but he died
in 1540, six years before Charles the Fifth attempted to establish
the Inquisition in Naples; and therefore it is not likely that he was
seriously molested while he was in office there.[868]
[868] Llorente (Hist. de l’Inquisition, Tom. II. pp. 281 and
478) makes some mistakes about Valdés, of whom the best accounts
are to be found in McCrie’s “Hist. of the Progress, etc., of the
Reformation in Italy,” (Edinburgh, 1827, 8vo, pp. 106 and 121,)
and in his “Hist. of the Progress, etc., of the Reformation in
Spain” (Edinburgh, 1829, 8vo, pp. 140-146). Valdés is supposed to
have been an anti-Trinitarian, but McCrie does not admit it.
The Dialogue on Languages is supposed to be carried on between two
Spaniards and two Italians, at a country-house on the sea-shore, near
Naples, and is an acute discussion on the origin and character of the
Castilian. Parts of it are learned, but in these the author sometimes
falls into errors;[869] other parts are lively and entertaining; and
yet others are full of good sense and sound criticism. The principal
personage--the one who gives all the instructions and explanations--is
named Valdés; and from this circumstance, as well as from some
intimations in the Dialogue itself, it may be inferred that the
reformer was its author, and that it was written before 1536;[870]--a
point which, if established, would account for the suppression of the
manuscript, as the work of an adherent of Luther. In any event, the
Dialogue was not printed till 1737, and therefore, as a specimen of
pure and easy style, was lost on the age that produced it.[871]
[869] His chief error is in supposing that the Greek language
once prevailed generally in Spain, and constituted the basis of
an ancient Spanish language, which, he thinks, was spread through
the country before the Romans appeared in Spain.
[870] The intimations alluded to are, that the Valdés of
the Dialogue had been at Rome; that he was a person of some
authority; and that he had lived long at Naples and in other
parts of Italy. He speaks of Garcilasso de la Vega as if he were
alive, and Garcilasso died in 1536. Llorente, in a passage just
cited, calls Valdés the author of the Diálogo de las Lenguas; and
Clemencin--a safer authority--does the same, once, in the notes
to his edition of Don Quixote, (Tom. IV. p. 285,) though in many
other notes he treats it as if its author were unknown.
[871] The Diálogo de las Lenguas was not printed till it appeared
in Mayans y Siscar, “Orígenes de la Lengua Española,” (Madrid,
1737, 2 tom. 12mo); where it fills the first half of the second
volume, and is the best thing in the collection. Probably the
manuscript had been kept out of sight as the work of a well-known
heretic. Mayans says, that it could be traced to Zurita, the
historian, and that, in 1736, it was purchased for the Royal
Library, of which Mayans himself was then librarian. One leaf
was wanting, which he could not supply; and though he seems to
have believed Valdés to have been the author of the Dialogue, he
avoids saying so,--perhaps from an unwillingness to attract the
notice of the Inquisition to it. (Orígenes, Tom. I. pp. 173-180.)
Iriarte, in the “Aprobacion” of the collection, treats the
Diálogo as if its author were quite unknown.
For us it is important, because it shows, with more distinctness than
any other literary monument of its time, what was the state of the
Spanish language in the reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth; a
circumstance of consequence to the condition of the literature, and one
to which we therefore turn with interest.
As might be expected, we find, when we look back, that the language of
letters in Spain has made material progress since we last noticed it
in the reign of John the Second. The example of Juan de Mena had been
followed, and the national vocabulary enriched during the interval
of a century, by successive poets, from the languages of classical
antiquity. From other sources, too, and through other channels,
important contributions had flowed in. From America and its commerce
had come the names of those productions which half a century of
intercourse had brought to Spain, and rendered familiar there,--terms
few, indeed, in number, but of daily use.[872] From Germany and the Low
Countries still more had been introduced by the accession of Charles
the Fifth,[873] who, to the great annoyance of his Spanish subjects,
arrived in Spain surrounded by foreign courtiers, and speaking with
a stranger accent the language of the country he was called to
govern.[874] A few words, too, had come accidentally from France; and
now, in the reign of Philip the Second, a great number, amounting to
the most considerable infusion the language had received since the time
of the Arabs, were brought in through the intimate connection of Spain
with Italy and the increasing influence of Italian letters and Italian
culture.[875]
[872] Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. I. p. 97.
[873] Ibid., p. 98.
[874] Sandoval says that Charles V. suffered greatly in the
opinion of the Spaniards, on his first arrival in Spain, because,
owing to his inability to speak Spanish, they had hardly any
proper intercourse with him. It was, he adds, as if they could
not talk with him at all. Historia, Anvers, 1681, folio, Tom. I.
p. 141.
[875] Mayans y Siscar, Orígenes, Tom. II. pp. 127-133. The author
of the Diálogo urges the introduction of a considerable number
of words from the Italian, such as _discurso_, _facilitar_,
_fantasia_, _novela_, etc., which have long since been adopted
and fully recognized by the Academy. Diego de Mendoza, though
partly of the Italian school, objected to the word _centinela_
as a needless Italianism; but it was soon fully received into
the language. (Guerra de Granada, ed. 1776, Lib. III. c. 7, p.
176.) A little later, Luis Velez de Guevara, in Tranco X. of his
“Diablo Cojuelo,” denied citizenship to _fulgor_, _purpurear_,
_pompa_, and other words now in good use.
We may therefore consider that the Spanish language at this period
was not only formed, but that it had reached substantially its full
proportions, and had received all its essential characteristics.
Indeed, it had already for half a century been regularly cared for
and cultivated. Alonso de Palencia, who had long been in the service
of his country as an ambassador, and was afterwards its chronicler,
published a Latin and Spanish Dictionary in 1490; the oldest in which a
Castilian vocabulary is to be found.[876] This was succeeded, two years
later, by the first Castilian Grammar, the work of Antonio de Lebrixa,
who had before published a Latin Grammar in the Latin language, and
translated it for the benefit, as he tells us, of the ladies of the
court.[877] Other similar and equally successful attempts followed. A
purely Spanish Dictionary by Lebrixa, the first of its kind, appeared
in 1492, and a Dictionary for ecclesiastical purposes, in both Latin
and Spanish, by Santa Ella, succeeded it in 1499; both often reprinted
afterwards, and long regarded as standard authorities.[878] All these
works, so important for the consolidation of the language, and so well
constructed that successors to them were not found till above a century
later,[879] were, it should be observed, produced under the direct
and personal patronage of Queen Isabella, who in this, as in so many
other ways, gave proof at once of her far-sightedness in affairs of
state, and of her wise tastes and preferences in whatever regarded the
intellectual cultivation of her subjects.[880]
[876] Mendez, Typographía, p. 175. Antonio, Bib. Vetus, ed.
Bayer, Tom. II. p. 333.
[877] Mendez, Typog., pp. 239-242. For the great merits of
Antonio de Lebrixa, in relation to the Spanish language, see
“Specimen Bibliothecæ Hispano-Mayansianæ ex Museo D. Clementis,”
Hannoveræ, 1753, 4to, pp. 4-39.
[878] Mendez, pp. 243 and 212, and Antonio, Bib. Nova, Tom. II.
p. 266.
[879] The Grammar of Juan de Navidad, 1567, is not an exception
to this remark, because it was intended to teach Spanish to
Italians, and not to natives.
[880] Clemencin, in Mem. de la Academia de Historia, Tom. VI. p.
472, notes.
The language thus formed was now fast spreading throughout the kingdom,
and displacing dialects some of which, as old as itself, had seemed,
at one period, destined to surpass it in cultivation and general
prevalence. The ancient Galician, in which Alfonso the Wise was
educated, and in which he sometimes wrote, was now known as a polite
language only in Portugal, where it had risen to be so independent of
the stock from which it sprang as almost to disavow its origin. The
Valencian and Catalonian, those kindred dialects of the Provençal race,
whose influences in the thirteenth century were felt through the whole
Peninsula, claimed, at this period, something of their earlier dignity
only below the last range of hills on the coast of the Mediterranean.
The Biscayan alone, unchanged as the mountains which sheltered it,
still preserved for itself the same separate character it had at the
earliest dawnings of tradition,--a character which has continued
essentially the same down to our own times.
But though the Castilian, advancing with the whole authority of the
government, which at this time spoke to the people of all Spain in no
other language, was heard and acknowledged throughout the country as
the language of the state and of all political power, still the popular
and local habits of four centuries could not be at once or entirely
broken up. The Galician, the Valencian, and the Catalonian continued
to be spoken in the age of Charles the Fifth, and are spoken now by
the masses of the people in their respective provinces, and to some
extent in the refined society of each. Even Andalusia and Aragon have
not yet emancipated themselves completely from their original idioms;
and in the same way, each of the other grand divisions of the country,
several of which were at one time independent kingdoms, are still,
like Estremadura and La Mancha, distinguished by peculiarities of
phraseology and accent.[881]
[881] It is curious to observe, that the author of the “Diálogo
de las Lenguas,” (Orígenes, Tom. II. p. 31,) who wrote about
1535, Mayans, (Orígenes, Tom. I. p. 8,) who wrote in 1737, and
Sarmiento, (Memorias, p. 94,) who wrote about 1760, all speak of
the character of the Castilian and the prevalence of the dialects
in nearly the same terms.
Castile alone, and especially Old Castile, claims, as of inherited
right, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, the prerogative
of speaking absolutely pure Spanish. Villalobos, it is true, who was
always a flatterer of royal authority, insisted that this prerogative
followed the residences of the sovereign and the court;[882] but the
better opinion has been, that the purest form of the Castilian must be
sought at Toledo,--the Imperial Toledo, as it was called,--peculiarly
favored when it was the political capital of the ancient monarchy in
the time of the Goths, and consecrated anew as the ecclesiastical
head of all Christian Spain, the moment it was rescued from the hands
of the Moors.[883] It has even been said, that the supremacy of this
venerable city in the purity of its dialect was so fully settled, from
the first appearance of the language as the language of the state in
the thirteenth century, that Alfonso the Wise, in a Cortes held there,
directed the meaning of any disputed word to be settled by its use at
Toledo.[884] But however this may be, there is no question, that, from
the time of Charles the Fifth to the present day, the Toledan has been
considered, on the whole, the normal form of the national language, and
that, from the same period, the Castilian dialect, having vindicated
for itself an absolute supremacy over all the other dialects of the
monarchy, has been the only one recognized as the language of the
classical poetry and prose of the whole country.
[882] De las Fiebres Interpoladas, Metro I., Obras, 1543, f. 27.
[883] See Mariana’s account of the glories of Toledo, Historia,
Lib. XVI. c. 15, and elsewhere. He was himself from the kingdom
of Toledo, and often boasts of its renown. Cervantes, in Don
Quixote, (Parte II. c. 19,) implies that the Toledan was
accounted the purest Spanish of his time. It still claims to be
so in ours.
[884] “Also, at the same Cortes, the same King, Don Alfonso X.,
ordered, if thereafter there should be a doubt in any part of his
kingdom about the meaning of any Castilian word, that reference
thereof should be had to this city as to the standard of the
Castilian tongue [como á metro de la lengua Castellana], and that
they should adopt the meaning and definition here given to such
word, because our tongue is more perfect here than elsewhere.”
(Francisco de Pisa, Descripcion de la Imperial Ciudad de Toledo,
ed. Thomas Tamaio de Vargas, Toledo, 1617, fol., Lib. I. c. 36,
f. 56.) The Cortes here referred to is said by Pisa to have
been held in 1253; in which year the Chronicle of Alfonso X.
(Valladolid, 1554, fol., c. 2) represents the king to have been
there.
CHAPTER VI.
CHRONICLING PERIOD GONE BY.--CHARLES THE FIFTH.--GUEVARA.--
OCAMPO.--SEPÚLVEDA.--MEXIA.--ACCOUNTS OF THE NEW WORLD.--
CORTÉS.--GOMARA.--BERNAL DIAZ.--OVIEDO.--LAS CASAS.--VACA.--
XEREZ.--ÇARATE.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is obvious that the
age for chronicles had gone by in Spain. Still it was thought for
the dignity of the monarchy that the stately forms of the elder
time should, in this as in other particulars, be kept up by public
authority. Charles the Fifth, therefore, as if his ambitious projects
as a conqueror were to find their counterpart in his arrangements
for recording their success, had several authorized chroniclers, all
men of consideration and learning. But the shadow on the dial would
not go back at the royal command. The greatest monarch of his time
could appoint chroniclers, but he could not give them the spirit of
an age that was past. The chronicles he demanded at their hands were
either never undertaken or never finished. Antonio de Guevara, one of
the persons to whom these duties were assigned, seems to have been
singularly conscientious in the devotion of his time to them; for
we are told, that, by his will, he ordered the salary of one year,
during which he had written nothing of his task, to be returned to
the Imperial treasury. This, however, did not imply that he was a
successful chronicler.[885] What he wrote was not thought worthy of
being published by his contemporaries, and would probably be judged
no more favorably by the present generation, unless it discovered a
greater regard for historical truth, and a better style, than are found
in his discussions on the life and character of the Emperor Marcus
Aurelius.[886]
[885] Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 127, and Preface to
Epístolas Familiares of Guevara, ed. 1673.
[886] See the vituperative article _Guevara_, in Bayle.
Florian de Ocampo, another of the more distinguished of the
chroniclers, showed a wide ambition in the plan he proposed to himself;
beginning his chronicles of Charles the Fifth as far back as the
days of Noah’s flood. As might have been foreseen, he lived only so
long as to finish a small fragment of his vast undertaking;--hardly
a quarter part of the first of its four grand divisions.[887] But he
went far enough to show how completely the age for such writing was
passed away.[888] Not that he failed in credulity; for of that he had
more than enough. It was not, however, the poetical credulity of his
predecessors, trusting to the old national traditions, but an easy
faith, that believed in the wearisome forgeries called the works of
Berosus and Manetho,[889] which had been discredited from their first
appearance half a century before, and yet were now used by Ocampo
as if they were the probable, if not the sufficient, records of an
uninterrupted succession of Spanish kings from Tubal, a grandson of
Noah. Such a credulity has no charm about it. But besides this, the
work of Ocampo, in its very structure, is dry and absurd; and, being
written in a formal and heavy style, it is all but impossible to read
it. He died in 1555, the year the Emperor abdicated, leaving us little
occasion to regret that he had brought his annals of Spain no lower
down than the age of the Scipios.
[887] The best life of Ocampo is to be found in the “Biblioteca
de los Escritores que han sido Individuos de los Seis Colegios
Mayores,” etc., por Don Josef de Rezabal y Ugarte (pp. 233-238);
but there is one prefixed to the edition of his Crónica, 1791.
[888] The first edition of the first four books of the Chronicle
of Ocampo was published at Zamora, 1544, in a beautiful
black-letter folio, and was followed by an edition of the whole
at Medina del Campo, 1553, folio. The best, I suppose, is the one
published at Madrid, 1791, in 2 vols. 4to.
[889] For this miserable forgery see Niceron (Hommes Illustres,
Paris, 1730, Tom. XI. pp. 1-11; Tom. XX., 1732, pp. 1-6);--and
for the simplicity of Ocampo in trusting to it, see the last
chapter of his first book, and all the passages where he cites
Juan de Viterbo _y su Beroso_, etc.
Juan Ginez de Sepúlveda was also charged by the Emperor fitly to
record the events of his reign;[890] and so was Pero Mexia;[891] but
the history of the former, which was first published by the Academy
in 1780, is in Latin, while that of Mexia, written, apparently,
after 1545, and coming down to the coronation at Bologna, was never
published at all.[892] A larger history, however, by the last author,
consisting of the lives of all the Roman emperors from Julius Cæsar
to Maximilian of Austria, the predecessor of Charles the Fifth, which
was printed several times, and is spoken of as an introduction to his
Chronicle, shows, notwithstanding its many imperfections of style,
that his purpose was to write a true and well-digested history, since
he generally refers, under each reign, to the authorities on which he
relies.[893]
[890] Pero Mexia, in the concluding words of his “Historia
Imperial y Cesarea.”
[891] Capmany, Eloquencia Española, Tom. II. p. 295.
[892] I say “apparently,” because in his “Historia Imperial y
Cesarea,” he declares, speaking of the achievements of Charles
V., “I never was so presumptuous as to deem myself sufficient
to record them.” This was in 1545. He was not appointed
Historiographer till 1548. See notices of him by Pacheco, in the
Semanario Pintoresco, 1844, p. 406. He died in 1552.
From the time of Charles V. there seem generally to have been
chroniclers of the kingdom and chroniclers of the personal
history of its kings. At any rate, that monarch had Ocampo and
Garibay for the first purpose; and Guevara, Sepúlveda, and Mexia
for the second. Lorenço de Padilla, Archdeacon of Málaga, is also
mentioned by Dormer (Progresos, Lib. II. c. 2) as one of his
chroniclers. Indeed, it does not seem easy to determine how many
enjoyed the honor of that title.
[893] The first edition appeared in 1545. The one I use is of
Anvers, 1561, fol. The best notice of his life, perhaps, is the
article about him in the Biographie Universelle.
Such works as these prove to us that we have reached the final limit of
the old chronicling style; and that we must now look for the appearance
of the different forms of regular historical composition in Spanish
literature. But before we approach them, we must pause a moment on a
few histories and accounts of the New World, which, during the reign
of Charles the Fifth, were of more importance than the imperfect
chronicles we have just noticed of the Spanish empire in Europe. For
as soon as the adventurers that followed Columbus were landed on the
western shores of the Atlantic, we begin to find narratives, more
or less ample, of their discoveries and settlements; some written
with spirit, and even in good taste; others quite unattractive in
their style; but nearly all interesting from their subject and their
materials, if from nothing else.
In the foreground of this picturesque group stands, as the most
brilliant of its figures, Fernando Cortés, called, by way of eminence,
_El Conquistador_, the Conqueror. He was born of noble parentage, and
carefully bred; and though his fiery spirit drove him from Salamanca
before his education could be completed, and brought him to the New
World, in 1504, when he was hardly nineteen years old,[894] still the
nurture of his youth, so much better than that of most of the other
American adventurers, is apparent in his voluminous documents and
letters, both published and unpublished. Of these, the most remarkable
were, no doubt, five long and detailed Reports to the Emperor on the
affairs of Mexico; the first of which, and probably the most curious,
dated in 1519, seems to be lost, and the last, belonging, probably,
to 1527, exists only in manuscript.[895] The four that remain are
well written and have a business-like air about them, as well as a
clearness and good taste which remind us sometimes, though rarely, of
the “Relazioni” of Machiavelli, and sometimes of Cæsar’s Commentaries.
His letters, on the other hand, are occasionally more ornamented. In an
unpublished one, written about 1533, and in which, when his fortunes
were waning, he sets forth his services and his wrongs, he pleases
himself with telling the Emperor that he “keeps two of his Majesty’s
letters like holy relics,” adding, that “the favors of his Majesty
towards him had been quite too ample for so small a vase”;--courtly
and graceful phrases, such as are not found in the documents of his
later years, when, disappointed and disgusted with affairs and with the
court, he retired to a morose solitude, where he died in 1554, little
consoled by his rank, his wealth, or his glory.
[894] He left Salamanca two or three years before he came to the
New World; but old Bernal Diaz, who knew him well, says: “He was
a scholar, and I have heard it said he was a Bachelor of Laws;
and when he talked with lawyers and scholars, he answered in
Latin. He was somewhat of a poet, and made couplets in metre and
in prose, [en metro y en prosa,]” etc. It would be amusing to
see poems by Cortés, and especially what the rude old chronicler
calls _coplas en prosa_; but he knew about as much concerning
such matters as Mons. Jourdain. Cortés, however, was always fond
of the society of cultivated men. In his house at Madrid, (see
_ante_, p. 537,) after his return from America, was held one of
those _Academies_ which were then beginning to be imitated from
Italy.
[895] The printed “Relaciones” may be found in Barcia,
“Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales,” (Madrid,
1749, 3 tom., folio,)--a collection printed after its editor’s
death and very ill arranged. Barcia was a man of literary
distinction, much employed in affairs of state, and one of
the founders of the Spanish Academy. He died in 1743. (Baena,
Hijos de Madrid, Tom. I. p. 106.) For the last and unpublished
“Relacion” of Cortés, as well as for his unpublished letters, I
am indebted to my friend Mr. Prescott, who has so well used them
in his “Conquest of Mexico.”
The marvellous achievements of Cortés in Mexico, however, were
more fully, if not more accurately, recorded by Francisco Lopez
de Gomara,--the oldest of the regular historians of the New
World,[896]--who was born at Seville in 1510, and was, for some time,
Professor of Rhetoric at Alcalá. His early life, spent in the great
mart of the American adventurers, seems to have given him an interest
in them and a knowledge of their affairs which led him to write their
history. The works he produced, besides one or two of less consequence,
were, first, his “History of the Indies,” which, after the Spanish
fashion, begins with the creation of the world, and ends with the
glories of Spain, though it is chiefly devoted to Columbus and the
discovery and conquest of Peru; and, second, his “Chronicle of New
Spain,” which is, in truth, merely the History and Life of Cortés, and
which, with this more appropriate title, was reprinted by Bustamente,
in Mexico, in 1826.[897] As the earliest records that were published
concerning affairs which already stirred the whole of Christendom,
these works had, at once, a great success, passing through two editions
almost immediately, and being soon translated into French and Italian.
[896] “The first worthy of being so called,” says Muñoz, Hist.
del Nuevo Mundo, Madrid, 1793, folio, p. xviii.
[897] The two works of Gomara may be well consulted in Barcia,
“Historiadores Primitivos,” Tom. II., which they fill. They were
first printed in 1553, and though, as Antonio says, (Bib. Nov.,
Tom. I. p. 437,) they were forbidden to be either reprinted
or read, four editions of them appeared before the end of the
century.
But though Gomara’s style is easy and flowing, both in his mere
narration and in those parts of his works which so amply describe
the resources of the newly discovered countries, he did not succeed
in producing any thing of permanent authority. He was the secretary
of Cortés, and was misled by information received from him, and from
other persons, who were too much a part of the story they undertook to
relate to tell it fairly.[898] His mistakes, in consequence, are great
and frequent, and were exposed with much zeal by Bernal Diaz, an old
soldier, who, having already been twice to the New World, went with
Cortés to Mexico in 1519,[899] and fought there so often and so long,
that, many years afterwards, he declared he could sleep with comfort
only when his armour was on.[900] As soon as he read the accounts of
Gomara, he set himself sturdily at work to answer them, and in 1558
completed his task.[901] The book he thus produced is written with much
personal vanity, and runs, in a rude style, into wearisome details; but
it is full of the zealous and honest nationality of the old chronicles,
so that, while we are reading it, we seem to be carried back into the
preceding ages, and to be again in the midst of a sort of fervor and
faith which, in writers like Gomara and Cortés, we feel sure we are
fast leaving behind us.
[898] “About this first going of Cortés as captain on this
expedition, the ecclesiastic Gomara tells many things grossly
untrue in his history, as might be expected from a man who
neither saw nor heard any thing about them, except what Fernando
Cortés told him and gave him in writing; Gomara being his
chaplain and servant, after he was made Marquis and returned to
Spain the last time.” Las Casas, (Historia de las Indias, Parte
III. c. 113, MS.,) a prejudiced witness, but, on a point of fact
within his own knowledge, one to be believed.
[899] See “Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva
España, por el Capitan Bernal Diaz del Castillo, uno de los
Conquistadores,” Madrid, 1632, folio, cap. 211.
[900] He says he was in one hundred and nineteen battles (f. 254.
d); that is, I suppose, fights of all kinds.
[901] It was not printed till long afterwards, and was then
dedicated to Philip IV. Some of its details are quite ridiculous.
He gives even a list of the individual horses that were used on
the great expedition of Cortés, and often describes the separate
qualities of a favorite charger as carefully as he does those of
his rider.
Among the persons who early came to America, and have left important
records of their adventures and times, one of the most considerable was
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo. He was born at Madrid, in 1478,[902] and,
having been well educated at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, as
one of the pages of Prince John, was sent out, in 1513, as a supervisor
of gold-smeltings, to San Domingo,[903] where, except occasional visits
to Spain and to different Spanish possessions in America, he lived
nearly forty years, devoted to the affairs of the New World. Oviedo
seems, from his youth, to have had a passion for writing; and, besides
several less considerable works, among which were imperfect chronicles
of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Charles the Fifth, and a life of
Cardinal Ximenes,[904] he prepared two of no small value.
[902] “Yo naci año de 1478,” he says, in his “Quinquagenas,”
when noticing Pedro Fernandez de Córdoba; and he more than once
speaks of himself as a native of Madrid. He says, too, expressly,
that he was present at the surrender of Granada, and that he saw
Columbus at Barcelona, on his first return from America in 1493.
Quinquagenas, MS.
[903] “Veedor de las Fundiciones de Oro,” he describes himself in
the Proemio of his work presented to Charles V. in 1525 (Barcia,
Tom. I.); and long afterwards, in the opening of Book XLVII. of
his Historias, MS., he still speaks of himself as holding the
same office.
[904] I do not feel sure that Antonio is not mistaken in
ascribing to Oviedo a _separate_ life of Cardinal Ximenes,
because the life contained in the “Quinquagenas” is so ample; but
the Chronicles of Ferdinand and Isabella, and Charles V., are
alluded to by Oviedo himself in the Proemio to Charles V. Neither
has ever been printed.
The most important of these two is “The Natural and General History
of the Indies,” filling fifty books, of which the first portions,
embracing twenty-one, were published in 1535, while the rest are still
found only in manuscript. As early as 1525, when he was at Toledo,
and offered Charles the Fifth a summary of the History of Hispaniola,
he speaks of his desire to have his larger work printed. But it
appears, from the beginning of the thirty-third book and the end of
the thirty-fourth, that he was still employed upon it in 1547 and
1548; and it is not unlikely, from the words with which he concludes
the thirty-seventh, that he kept each of its larger divisions open,
and continued to make additions to them nearly to the time of his
death.[905]
[905] He calls it, in his letter to the Emperor, at the end of
the “Sumario” in 1525, “La General y Natural Historia de las
Indias, que de mi mano tengo escrita”;--in the Introduction to
Lib. XXXIII. he says, “En treinta y quatro años que ha que estoy
en estas partes”;--and in the ninth chapter, which ends Lib.
XXXIV., we have an event recorded with the date of 1548;--so
that, for these three-and-twenty years, he was certainly
employed, more or less, on this great work. But at the end of
Book XXXVII. he says, “Y esto baste quanto a este breve libro
del numero treinta y siete, hasta que el tiempo nos avise de
otras cosas que en el se acrescientan”; from which I infer that
he kept each book, or each large division of his work, open for
additions, as long as he lived, and therefore that parts of it
_may_ have been written as late as 1557.
He tells us that he had the Emperor’s authority to demand, from the
different governors of Spanish America, the documents he might need
for his work;[906] and as his divisions of the subject are those
which naturally arise from its geography, he appears to have gone
judiciously about his task. But the materials he was to use were in too
crude a state to be easily manageable, and the whole subject was too
wide and various for his powers. He falls, therefore, into a loose,
rambling style, instead of aiming at philosophical condensation; and,
far from an abridgment, which his work ought to have been, he gives
us chronicling, documentary accounts of an immense extent of newly
discovered country, and of the extraordinary events that had been
passing there,--sometimes too short and slight to be interesting, and
sometimes too detailed for the reader’s patience. He was evidently a
learned man, and maintained a correspondence with Ramusio, the Italian
geographer, which could not fail to be useful to both parties.[907]
And he was desirous to write in a good and eloquent style, in which he
sometimes succeeded. He has, therefore, on the whole, produced a series
of accounts of the natural condition, the aboriginal inhabitants,
and the political affairs of the wide-spread Spanish possessions in
America, as they stood in the middle of the sixteenth century, which
is of great value as a vast repository of facts, and not wholly without
merit as a composition.[908]
[906] “I have royal orders that the governors should send me
a relation of whatever I shall touch in the affairs of their
governments, for this History.” (Lib. XXXIII., Introd., MS.)
I apprehend, Oviedo was the first authorized Chronicler of
the New World, an office which was at one period better paid
than any other similar office in the kingdom, and was held, at
different times, by Herrera, Tamayo, Solís, and other writers
of distinction. It ceased, I believe, with the creation of the
Academy of History.
[907] “We owe much to those who give us notice of what we have
not seen or known ourselves; as I am now indebted to a remarkable
and learned man, of the illustrious Senate of Venice, called
Secretary Juan Bautista Ramusio, who, hearing that I was inclined
to the things of which I here treat, has, without knowing me
personally, sought me for his friend and communicated with me by
letters, sending me a new geography,” etc. Lib. XXXVIII., MS.
[908] As a specimen of his manner, I add the following account of
Almagro, one of the early adventurers in Peru, whom the Pizarros
put to death in Cuzco, after they had obtained uncontrolled
power there. “Therefore hear and read all the authors you may,
and compare, one by one, whatever they relate, that all men,
not kings, have freely given away, and you shall surely see how
there is none that can equal Almagro in this matter, and how none
can be compared to him; for kings, indeed, may give and know
how to give whatever pleaseth them, both cities and lands, and
lordships, and other great gifts; but that a man whom yesterday
we saw so poor, that all he possessed was a very small matter,
should have a spirit sufficient for what I have related,--I hold
it to be so great a thing, that I know not the like of it in our
own or any other time. For I myself saw, when his companion,
Pizarro, came from Spain, and brought with him that body of
three hundred men to Panamá, that, if Almagro had not received
them and shown them so much free hospitality with so generous a
spirit, few or none of them could have escaped alive; for the
land was filled with disease, and the means of living were so
dear, that a bushel of maize was worth two or three _pesos_, and
an _arroba_ of wine six or seven gold pieces. To all of them he
was a father, and a brother, and a true friend; for inasmuch as
it is pleasant and grateful to some men to make gain, and to
heap up and to gather together moneys and estates, even so much
and more pleasant was it to him to share with others and to give
away; so that the day when he gave nothing, he accounted it for
a day lost. And in his very face you might see the pleasure and
true delight he felt when he found occasion to help him who had
need. And since, after so long a fellowship and friendship as
there was between these two great leaders, from the days when
their companions were few and their means small, till they saw
themselves full of wealth and strength, there hath at last come
forth so much discord, scandal, and death, well must it appear
matter of wonder even to those who shall but hear of it, and
much more to us, who knew them in their low estate, and have no
less borne witness to their greatness and prosperity.” (General
y Natural Historia de las Indias, Lib. XLVII., MS.) Much of it
is, like the preceding passage, in the true, old, rambling,
moralizing, chronicling vein.
The other considerable work of Oviedo, the fruit of his old age,
is devoted to fond recollections of his native country and of the
distinguished men he had known there. He calls it “Las Quinquagenas,”
and it consists of a series of dialogues, in which, with little method
or order, he gives gossiping accounts of the principal families that
figured in Spain during the times of Ferdinand and Isabella and Charles
the Fifth, mingled with anecdotes and recollections, such as--not
without a simple-hearted exhibition of his own vanity--the memory of
his long and busy life could furnish. It appears from the Dialogue on
Cardinal Ximenes, and elsewhere, that he was employed on it as early as
1545;[909] but the year 1550 occurs yet more frequently among the dates
of its imaginary conversations,[910] and at the conclusion he very
distinctly declares that it was finished on the 23d of May, 1556, when
he was seventy-nine years old. He died in Valladolid, the next year.
[909] “En este que estamos de 1545.” Quinquagenas, MS., El
Cardinal Cisneros.
[910] As in the Dialogue on Juan de Silva, Conde de Cifuentes,
he says, “En este año en que estamos 1550”; and in the Dialogue
on Mendoza, Duke of Infantado, he uses the same words, as he
does again in that on Pedro Fernandez de Córdova. There is an
excellent note on Oviedo, in Vol. I. p. 112 of the American ed.
of “Ferdinand and Isabella,” by my friend Mr. Prescott, to whom I
am indebted for the manuscript of the Quinquagenas, as well as of
the Historia.
But both during his life and after his death, Oviedo had a formidable
adversary, who, pursuing nearly the same course of inquiries respecting
the New World, came almost constantly to conclusions quite opposite.
This was no less a person than Bartolomé de las Casas, or Casaus, the
apostle and defender of the American Indians,--a man who would have
been remarkable in any age of the world, and who does not seem yet
to have gathered in the full harvest of his honors. He was born in
Seville, probably in 1474; and in 1502, having gone through a course
of studies at Salamanca, embarked for the Indies, where his father,
who had been there with Columbus nine years earlier, had already
accumulated a decent fortune.
The attention of the young man was early drawn to the condition of the
natives, from the circumstance, that one of them, given to his father
by Columbus, had been attached to his own person as a slave, while
he was still at the University; and he was not slow to learn, on his
arrival in Hispaniola, that their gentle natures and slight frames
had already been subjected, in the mines and in other forms of toil,
to a servitude so harsh, that the original inhabitants of the island
were beginning to waste away under the severity of their labors. From
this moment he devoted his life to their emancipation. In 1510 he
took holy orders, and continued as a priest, and for a short time as
Bishop of Chiapa, nearly forty years, to teach, strengthen, and console
the suffering flock committed to his charge. Six times, at least, he
crossed the Atlantic, in order to persuade the government of Charles
the Fifth to ameliorate their condition, and always with more or less
success. At last, but not until 1547, when he was above seventy years
old, he established himself at Valladolid, in Spain, where he passed
the remainder of his serene old age, giving it freely to the great
cause to which he had devoted the freshness of his youth. He died,
while on a visit of business, at Madrid, in 1566, at the advanced age,
as is commonly supposed, of ninety-two.[911]
[911] There is a valuable life of Las Casas in Quintana, “Vidas
de Españoles Célebres” (Madrid, 1833, 12mo, Tom. III. pp.
255-510). The seventh article in the Appendix, concerning the
connection of Las Casas with the slave-trade, will be read with
particular interest; because, by materials drawn from unpublished
documents of unquestionable authenticity, it makes it certain,
that, although at one time Las Casas favored what had been begun
earlier,--the transportation of negroes to the West Indies, in
order to relieve the Indians,--as other good men in his time
favored it, he did so under the impression, that, according to
the law of nations, the negroes thus brought to America were both
rightful captives taken by the Portuguese in war and rightful
slaves. But afterwards he changed his mind on the subject. He
declared “the captivity of the negroes to be as unjust as that of
the Indians,”--“ser tan injusto el cautiverio de los negros como
el de los Indios,”--and even expressed a fear, that, though he
had fallen into the error of favoring the importation of black
slaves into America from ignorance and good-will, he might, after
all, fail to stand excused for it before the Divine Justice.
Quintana, Tom. III. p. 471.
Among the principal opponents of his benevolence were Sepúlveda,--one
of the leading men of letters and casuists of the time in Spain,--and
Oviedo, who, from his connection with the mines and his share in the
government of different parts of the newly discovered countries,
had an interest directly opposite to the one Las Casas defended.
These two persons, with large means and a wide influence to sustain
them, intrigued, wrote, and toiled against him, in every way in their
power. But his was not a spirit to be daunted by opposition or deluded
by sophistry and intrigue; and when, in 1519, in a discussion with
Sepúlveda concerning the Indians, held in the presence of the young and
proud Emperor Charles the Fifth, Las Casas said, “It is quite certain,
that, speaking with all the respect and reverence due to so great a
sovereign, I would not, save in the way of duty and obedience as a
subject, go from the place where I now stand to the opposite corner of
this room, to serve your Majesty, unless I believed I should at the
same time serve God,”[912]--when he said this, he uttered a sentiment
that really governed his life and constituted the basis of the great
power he exercised. His works are pervaded by it. The earliest of
them, called “A very Short Account of the Ruin of the Indies,” was
written in 1542,[913] and dedicated to the prince, afterwards Philip
the Second;--a tract in which, no doubt, the sufferings and wrongs of
the Indians are much overstated by the indignant zeal of its author,
but still one whose expositions are founded in truth, and by their
fervor awakened all Europe to a sense of the injustice they set
forth. Other short treatises followed, written with similar spirit
and power, especially those in reply to Sepúlveda; but none was so
often reprinted, either at home or abroad, as the first,[914] and none
ever produced so deep and solemn an effect on the world. They were
all collected and published in 1552; and, besides being translated
into other languages at the time, an edition in Spanish, and a French
version of the whole, with two more treatises than were contained in
the first collection, appeared at Paris in 1822, prepared by Llorente.
[912] Quintana, Españoles Célebres, Tom. III. p. 321.
[913] Quintana (p. 413, note) doubts _when_ this famous treatise
was written; but Las Casas himself says, in the opening of his
“Brevísima Relacion,” that it was written in 1542.
[914] This important tract continued long to be printed
separately, both at home and abroad. I use a copy of it in double
columns, Spanish and Italian, Venice, 1643, 12mo; but, like the
rest, the Brevísima Relacion may be consulted in an edition of
the Works of Las Casas by Llorente, which appeared at Paris in
1822, in 2 vols. 8vo, in the original Spanish, almost at the
same time with his translation of them into French. It should be
noticed, perhaps, that Llorente’s version is not always strict,
and that the two new treatises he imputes to Las Casas, as well
as the one on the Authority of Kings, are not absolutely proved
to be his.
The translation referred to above appeared, in fact, the same
year, and at the end of it an “Apologie de Las Casas,” by
Grégoire, with letters of Funes and Mier, and notes of Llorente
to sustain it,--all to defend Las Casas on the subject of the
slave-trade; but Quintana, as we have seen, has gone to the
original documents, and leaves no doubt, both that Las Casas once
favored it, and that he altered his mind afterwards.
The great work of Las Casas, however, still remains inedited,--a
General History of the Indies from 1492 to 1520, begun by him in 1527
and finished in 1561, but of which he ordered that no portion should
be published within forty years of his death. Like his other works, it
shows marks of haste and carelessness, and is written in a rambling
style; but its value, notwithstanding his too fervent zeal for the
Indians, is great. He had been personally acquainted with many of the
early discoverers and conquerors, and, at one time, possessed the
papers of Columbus, and a large mass of other important documents,
which are now lost. He says he had known Cortés “when he was so low
and humble, that he besought favor from the meanest servant of Diego
Velasquez”; and he knew him afterwards, he tells us, when, in his pride
of place at the court of the Emperor, he ventured to jest about the
pretty corsair’s part he had played in the affairs of Montezuma.[915]
He knew, too, Gomara and Oviedo, and gives at large his reasons for
differing from them. In short, his book, divided into three parts, is a
great repository, to which Herrera, and through him all the historians
of the Indies since, have resorted for materials; and without which the
history of the earliest period of the Spanish settlements in America
cannot, even now, be properly written.[916]
[915] “Todo esto me dixo el mismo Cortés con otras cosas cerca
dello, despues de Marques, en la villa de Monçon, estando alli
celebrando cortes el Emperador, año de mil y quinientos y
quarenta y dos, riendo y mofando con estas formales palabras,
a la mi fé andubé por alli como un gentil cosario.” (Historia
General de las Indias, Lib. III. c. 115, MS.) It may be worth
noting, that 1542, the year when Cortés made this scandalous
speech, was the year in which Las Casas wrote his Brevísima
Relacion.
[916] For a notice of all the works of Las Casas, see Quintana,
Vidas, Tom. III. pp. 507-510.
But it is not necessary to go farther into an examination of the old
accounts of the discovery and conquest of Spanish America, though there
are many more which, like those we have already considered, are partly
books of travel through countries full of wonders, partly chronicles
of adventures as strange as those of romance; frequently running into
idle and loose details, but as frequently fresh, picturesque, and manly
in their tone and coloring, and almost always curious from the facts
they record and the glimpses they give of manners and character. Among
those that might be added are the stories by Vaca of his shipwreck and
ten years’ captivity in Florida, from 1527 to 1537, and his subsequent
government for three years of the Rio de la Plata;[917] the short
account of the conquest of Peru written by Francisco de Xerez,[918]
and the ampler one, of the same wild achievements, which Augustin de
Çarate began on the spot, and was prevented by an officer of Gonzalo de
Pizarro from finishing till after his return home.[919] But they may
all be passed over, as of less consequence than those we have noticed,
which are quite sufficient to give an idea, both of the nature of
their class and the course it followed,--a class much resembling the
old chronicles, but yet one that announces the approach of those more
regular forms of history for which it furnishes abundant materials.
[917] The two works of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, namely, his
“Naufragios” and his “Comentarios y Sucesos de su Gobierno en el
Rio de la Plata,” were first printed in 1555, and are to be found
in Barcia, Historiadores Primitivos, Tom. I.
[918] The work of Francisco de Xerez, “Conquista de Peru,”
written by order of Francisco Pizarro, was first published in
1547, and is to be found in Ramusio, (Venezia, ed. Giunti, folio,
Tom. III.,) and in Barcia’s collection (Tom. III.). It ends with
some poor verses in defence of himself.
[919] “Historia del Descubrimiento y Conquista del Peru,” first
printed in 1555, and several times since. It is in Barcia, Tom.
III., and was translated into Italian by Ulloa. Çarate was sent
out by Charles V. to examine into the state of the revenues of
Peru, and brings down his accounts as late as the overthrow of
Gonzalo Pizarro. See an excellent notice of Çarate at the end of
Mr. Prescott’s last chapter on the Conquest of Peru.
END OF VOL. I.