THE STARTING-POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL--THE NATURAL
INFLUENCE OF ITALY--PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL--ITS
ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT--WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS--ITS
TECHNIQUE AND MATTER--ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE
SCHOOL--BOSCAN--GARCILASO--THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERS--THE SCHOOLS
OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE--GÓNGORA AND GÓNGORISM--THE EPICS--THE
‘ARAUCANA’--THE ‘LUSIADS.’
[SN: _The starting-point of the classic school._]
Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that the manner of the
introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables
us to see for once in a way exactly, when and at whose instigation a
literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible
authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement,
in the long letter to the Duchess of Soma, which is printed as a
preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his
friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.[5] En (to
give him his native title) Juan Boscan Almogaver was a Catalan of a
noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain,
but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He
died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty
as _ayo_, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva.
The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every
history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse
in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman
who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of
the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of
Castiglione’s _Courtier_, which was considered by the Spaniards as not
inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended
the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian
ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write “in the Italian manner.”
Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to
Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts,
and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more
famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon
custom, were combined into Garcilaso.[6] He was born in 1503 of a very
ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from
a ladder while leading a storming-party at Frèjus in 1536. Little is
known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that they cannot
have seen much of one another, for Boscan spent most of his life on
his estate or at Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and
then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all who followed “the
conquering banners” of the emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from
the Danube to Tunis.
[SN: _The natural influence of Italy._]
It would unquestionably be an error to conclude from the exact manner
of its beginning that there would have been no Spanish imitation of
Italian models if Boscan had not met Navagiero at Granada in 1526.
Garcilaso, Diego de Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no
doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and _canzones_ “in the
Italian manner” in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian
influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the
frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian
could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story
not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is
characteristic of the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to
playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of ingenuity, and as
an amusement for his leisure. He implies that Garcilaso acted on the
same motives as himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious
danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils and produce only
school exercises.
[SN: _Prevalence of the classic school._]
The ample following found by these two is itself a proof that
Navagiero’s advice and Boscan’s docility were hardly necessary. It
needed only an accident to provoke the literary activity of the
Italianate Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in the Court of Rome,
at Naples, and at home, where the “learned” men were all readers of
Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read in Spain, though a few
of her scholars were good Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the
school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of
praise--the word _docto_. The literal sense is “learned,” but educated
expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily
imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as
well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was
the language of education and diplomacy, and Italian was the language
of society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full sense of the
word. The seed fell on well-prepared soil. A quick and copious harvest
sprang up, which for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary
growth. The second half of the sixteenth century was the time of the
learned poets of Spain. The school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth
century, but it had produced its best work before 1600.
[SN: _Its aristocratic spirit._]
The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to expect to find
it composed of imitators who produced more or less ingenious school
exercises. Its works are extant to show that the expectation would be
well founded. Again, we should expect to find that it was always much
more of a society fashion than a manifestation of the real qualities of
the Spaniard in literature, and here also experience will be found to
confirm expectation. It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite
so indifferent to appearing in print as some others have been, but
still not uncommonly satisfied to leave its work in manuscript. These
poets could afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did not
thereby injure their fame in the only world to which they appealed.
They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured
the _romances_ and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their
own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised
chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works
were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his
death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from
Góngorism by the sight of better examples, while Góngora was able to
found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were
not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to
find readers among the _vulgo_, the common herd, of whose _brutez_,
or bestial stupidity, they habitually spoke in a very high and mighty
fashion. This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the learned
poets of Spain. It was habitual with the school of Ronsard, and indeed
common to the whole Renaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and
aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain’s learned poets
were not different from those of the Italian, the Frenchman, or the
Englishman, they were less fully justified. These very self-conscious
“children of the Muses” were not so superior to the vulgar herd
of writers of _romances_ and _coplas_ in poetic inspiration as to
be entitled to look down upon them, on the strength of a certain
mechanical dexterity acquired from foreigners by imitation.
[SN: _What was imitated from the Italian._]
The question what exactly it was that the innovators of the sixteenth
century took from their Italian masters is easier to put than to
answer. The mere imitation of Italian models was in itself no
novelty. Cristobal de Castillejo denied the claim of the new school
to originality in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he said,
already been written by Juan de Mena. So they had, and by Ausias March
and other poets of the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana
had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model; the _ottava rima_ and
tercets were not unknown to the Court school of Castile or to the
Catalans. The canzone had been written in Spain by imitators of the
earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the innovators to take?
If we look at the names only, and the bare skeleton of the verse,
little indeed; but when the manner of the execution is considered, a
great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the Spaniards allowed to
be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line
of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous
in their hands. The cæsura fell with unvarying regularity after the
fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby
to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more
slavish in imitation than their predecessors had been. [SN: _Its
technique and matter._] This slavishness was shown by the establishment
of the _endecasílabo piano_, with the unaccented vowel termination as
alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in _vocablos agudos_, in masculine
rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the
softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the
fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse
among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a limitation which was not
justified by the genius of their language, they began by impoverishing
their poetic vocabulary, and they did it in pure unintelligent
imitation. The restriction was not accepted without reluctance.
Rengifo, who is the Spanish Puttenham[7]--the author, that is to say,
of the standard work on the mechanism of verse written in Spain in the
close of the sixteenth century--even puts in a plea for the _verso
agudo_. He had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso had dared
to end a line with the word _vestí_. Boscan, who, however, is not
accepted by the Spaniards as of unimpeachable authority, had been so
left to himself as to end on _nació_, while Diego de Mendoza had done
the evil thing “a thousand times.” According to the stop-watch of the
new school this was wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their
offences in the _Egemplar Poético_--_i.e._, _Ars Poetica_--of Juan de
la Cueva.[8]
Yet Juan de la Cueba or Cueva (the _b_ and _v_, being very similar in
Spanish pronunciation, were constantly written for one another before
the spelling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of attention. His life
is covered by the obscurity common to the men of letters of the time,
and on the whole more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know that
he lived in Seville during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
His _Egemplar Poético_, though not considered as above reproach in form
by Spanish critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic creed of
the school, and is therefore of authority. Nothing is more striking
or, when the future of poetry in the two countries is considered, more
significant, than the contrast between the three verse epistles of Don
Juan de la Cueva, and the _Apologie for Poetrie_ of Sir Philip Sidney.
The _Egemplar_ is in tercets, and the _Apologie_ in fresh youthful
prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul
of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic
treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself
to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the
passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is
spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox.
On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the
Sevillian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he
thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be
found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence
of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the _profanum
vulgus_, the folly of applying the metres and language proper to kings
and great persons to the doings of common people. Then having cleared
the way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for a poet,--as
that no _cancion_ should contain more than fifteen stanzas; that a
_sestina_ is rhymed _a b c_, _c b a_, and that its lines ought to end
in nouns and never in verbs; that three adjectives are more than enough
for any substantive; that an _agudo_ at the end of a hendecasyllable
is the abomination of desolation; that the letter _l_ is useful for
sweetness; that _r_ comes in with good effect “when violent Eurus
opposes his rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas”; and that _s_
suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (“al blando sueño y al sabroso
sosiego”), for he did not scorn alliteration’s artful aid.
It would be trivial to insist on the _Egemplar Poético_ if the author
had been an insignificant man, or if the bulk of Spanish classic poetry
showed that he spoke only for himself. But Juan de la Cueva has an
honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic literature among
the forerunners of Lope de Vega. When he comes to write upon the comedy
he rises at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He
ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates
the right of his countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive,
Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and
all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please.
Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute
critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la Cueva’s teaching,
and therein lies the explanation of the impassable gulf which separates
the Spanish drama--a very genuine thing of its kind--from Spanish
classic poetry--a school exercise, redeemed from time to time by a note
of patriotism or of piety.
[SN: _Artificiality of the work of the school._]
When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter is likely to be as
merely imitative as its form. Spanish classic poetry did not escape
this fate, and there is only too much truth in the taunt of “sterile
abundance” which has been thrown at it. We meet continually with the
exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow of a lady whose “threads
of gold” (which the rude vulgar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love
has used to enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the
correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The same Tirsis and
the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a
landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is
withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics
have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the
life of their time,--but that is a small matter. They have--piety and
patriotism apart--little human reality of any kind. Love according
to an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the
Florentines, is the staple subject. Don Marcelino Menendez, the most
learned of contemporary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting
Ticknor’s theory that the Inquisition was accountable for the
prevalence of Góngorism, that the real explanation of that disaster
lies elsewhere. Europe, he says, was invaded in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which
could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not recognise the
truth of this judgment in the case of France and England, but it has
force as applied to Spain.
A general estimate of a school must always be difficult to justify
except by a profusion of quotation, which is impossible here. We
can do no more than leave it to be accepted or rejected by those
who can control it by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to
give such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our
limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads--the Lyric and
the Epic--and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant.
The leading form in lyric poetry is the _cancion_ in hendecasyllables
with _quebrados_--that is, broken lines of seven syllables. But the
_Epístola_ in tercets, imitated from the _capitolo_ of the Italians, is
very common. The song proper is wholly absent. There is no “Come unto
these yellow sands,” no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The Spaniard
does not sing; he chants.
[SN: _Boscan._]
Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly by virtue of the
example he set. He was somewhat harshly condemned by his follower,
Herrera, for hanging jewels robbed from the classics and Italians
on his own robe of frieze. The charge of plagiarism is not easily
rebutted, for Boscan certainly took his goods where he found them in
Virgil or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is undoubtedly
of the nature of frieze. What strikes the reader most in Boscan is
a certain worldly good sense, more like our own Queen Anne men than
the poetry of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His most
quoted piece, an _Epístola_ addressed to Diego de Mendoza, is eminently
rational prose disguised in verse, avowing a most heterodox affection
for his wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern), and a
quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a blazing fire of logs at
the end of a day in the open air. But we note also the maturity of the
language, in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer’s want
of skill. [SN: _Garcilaso._] This same premature and fatal maturity is
even more conspicuous in Garcilaso, who was more master of his pen.
In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains
of his prose--a letter to his friend’s wife praising her good taste
for enjoying the _Courtier_ of Castiglione--there is hardly a word
or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born
with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished
form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian
poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited--once at
Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the
name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as
the author of the _Minerva_; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera.
The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of
considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an
example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the
editors of Góngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing
literary quarrel. The Castilian critics, who were banded in support
of their own man, Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his
inappropriate display of scholastic pedantry, and most unjustly for
ignorance of Castilian. No Castilian will ever readily allow that an
Andalusian (which Herrera was) speaks the language quite correctly. Of
the matter of Garcilaso’s verse it may be said that it is pastoral, or
gentlemanlike, and melancholy. The Spaniard finds, no doubt, a charm in
the mere language, which of itself is enough; but even to him there may
be suspected to be some tedium in this obvious determination to get a
stool to be melancholy on. It is not the melancholy of Jorge Manrique,
who is saddened by those eternal sorrows, death of kin and friends and
the burden of life, but the melancholy of a gentleman who is imitating
a model to pass the time in winter quarters. But the so-called _Lira_
or ode, in lines of seven syllables mixed with hendecasyllabics,
addressed “To the flower of Gnidus” is elegant. It is in stanzas of
five lines, rhyming the first with the third, the second, fourth, and
fifth together, and enforces the well-known lesson, “Gather ye rosebuds
while ye may,” for the instruction of a young lady at Naples who had
not favoured the suit of one of the poet’s friends.
[SN: _Their immediate followers._]
Only a very full history of Spanish literature could afford to dwell
on Ferdinand de Acuña (Ferdinand, Fernando, Fernan, and Hernan are all
forms of the same name, employed according to taste or local usage),
who was a Portuguese noble in the service of Charles V., a soldier of
distinction, a writer of Castilian verse, and a copious translator
from the classics; or Gutierre de Cetina, a soldier best known by a
graceful madrigal;[10] or many others whom it would be a barren display
to name; but Diego Hurtado de Mendoza is too strong a man to be passed
in a crowd. He is chiefly famous as a man of action--as a soldier
who governed Siena for Charles V., and a diplomatist who represented
the emperor in a very military fashion at the Council of Trent. In
literature he ranks chiefly as the undoubted author of a history of
the revolt of the Moriscoes, and as the possible, though doubtful,
author of the _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Diego de Mendoza (1503-1575) was
a younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one of the many titled
branches of his famous house--the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct
descendant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him of that
Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the king at the battle of
Aljubarrota.[11] His poetry was the relaxation of a great noble who
broke through the rules in a fashion well calculated to horrify such
critics as Juan de la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him to
burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that order. Sometimes it
flamed out with little regard to decency. But in happier moments--as,
for instance, in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa--he could strike that
note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which is the finest in
Spanish poetry. Even in his case we have examples of the same premature
maturity noted in Boscan. One of his epistles addressed to this very
writer begins by the Horatian “Nil admirari”--an excellent maxim,
perhaps, but chilling in the first youth of a poetry. Mendoza wrote
not only in the Tuscan, but the native metres, couplets, and _glosas_.
The _glosa_ is a favourite exercise of verse-making ingenuity with the
Spaniard. It consists in taking any stanza of whatever number of lines,
and building on it a poem of the same number of stanzas as there are
lines. Each must end in one of the lines of the foundation stanza taken
in their order. They must be brought in without violence, and the whole
must be a variation on the theme of the stanza quoted. Diego de Mendoza
outlived Charles V., and spent his last years in exile at Granada,
incurred by a too great promptitude in resenting impertinence within
the precincts of the Court.
[SN: _The two schools of Salamanca and Seville._]
It has been the custom to divide the poets of Spain into the Castilian
and the Andalusian, or those of Salamanca and those of Seville.
The division is somewhat arbitrary, and corresponds to very little
distinction in tone, method, or language among the writers, or at least
so it seems to a foreigner who compares Luis de Leon with Hernan de
Herrera, though the first is counted as the chief of the school of
Salamanca, and the second as the chief of the school of Seville. Both
wrote the same fine Castilian, both were good scholars, and there was
the same intense religious feeling, the same high patriotism, in both.
Luis Ponce de Leon (1528-1591), as if to show how artificial this
distinction is, was born at Granada, which is one of the sub-kingdoms
of Andalusia.[12] He was an Augustine friar, and occupied two important
chairs in succession at Salamanca. Between 1572 and 1576 he was
imprisoned by the Inquisition. The charge made against him was that
he had translated the _Song of Solomon_, which, at a time when the
Reformers were making an active use of the Bible in the vernacular
tongues against the Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the
attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano, of whose _De Locis
Theologicis_ Dr Johnson wrote, “Nec admiror, nec multum laudo.” It
is a well-known story of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the
Holy Office was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume his
lectures, he began where he had left off, and with the words, “As we
were saying yesterday, gentlemen.” His poetry may be divided into
that part which is inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by
the Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should appear to more
advantage when he is paraphrasing the description of a perfect wife
from the _Proverbs of Solomon_ than when he is endeavouring to adapt
the _lira_ of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken because it bore
a certain resemblance to the subject of one of the odes of Horace.
These imitations of the classic models were not confined to the graver
and more reflective parts of his originals. Luis de Leon, though a
churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory poems. The _coplas_ in the
old Spanish metres called _A una Desdeñosa_--to a scornful lady--are
on exactly the same subject as the already named _Flor de Gnido_ of
Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics and learned poets of
his own country, or paraphrasing the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a
master of the very purest Castilian; while his reflective poems--the
_Noche Serena_, for instance, or the ode which imitates the _Beatus
Ille_ of Horace--are something more than mere exercises of ingenuity.
It was his reputation as a stylist which secured the publication of his
poems forty years after his death. Luis de Leon himself seems to have
considered them only as amusements for his leisure. But in 1631 Quevedo
brought out the first edition, in order to counteract the growing taste
for Góngorism.
The poet who has the honour to rank as a stylist among the Spaniards,
next to, if not on an equality with Garcilaso, is Hernan de Herrera of
Seville (1534-1597), a churchman of whose life almost nothing is known
with certainty.[13] As usual, he published little during his life, and
much of his manuscript was lost by an accident after his death. The
remainder was published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619.
Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their language which
display the greatest measure of force and dignity, would certainly
quote the famous odes on the battles of Lepanto and Alcázar el-Quebir,
together with the sonnet in honour of Don John of Austria. The vigour
of these verses is unquestionable, and if it cannot be claimed for them
that they display any great originality of form, they are animated by a
fine spirit of patriotism. Herrera, too, had a sense of the merits of
compression, which is not common with his countrymen. He worked at the
language in an artistic spirit.
Once more, as in the case of the immediate followers of Garcilaso, we
must pass over the names of all but the chiefs very lightly.[14] The
Aragonese brothers Lupercio and Bartolomé de Argensola, who may be
classed among the poets of Castile; Francisco de Figueroa, who spent
nearly all his life in Italy; Rioja, the poet of flowers, and the
author of a moral poem on the Ruins of Italica (a Roman colony near
Seville), inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many others, must
be passed over in silence. It is proper to note, however, that whatever
anybody else was doing at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great
quantities as men who did nothing else. But there will be occasion to
speak of Lope elsewhere. For the present he must make room for the
writer whom some have claimed as the most genuine lyric poet of Spain,
and who bears the discredit of having flooded the literature of his
country with a ruinous affectation.
[SN: _Góngora and Góngorism._]
Don Luis de Argote y Góngora, who habitually used the second of these
names, which was his mother’s, was a Cordovese, born in 1561.[15] He
was educated at Salamanca, followed the Court for some years, and was
attached to the Duke of Lerma. He took orders, and received a benefice
when advanced in life, and died in his native city in 1627. His evil
fame, based on the invention of the particular form of bad literature
called after him Góngorism, is greater than his good, which yet has
some foundation. His _romances_ on stories of captives among Barbary
pirates, and of wars on the frontiers, are among the best of their
kind. Among his earlier poems on the Tuscan models there are some
which possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very rare
among the Spaniards. The third _cancion_, for instance, contains a
singularly passionate and admirably worded variation, on the theme of
Shakespeare’s forty-fourth sonnet, “If the dull substance of my flesh
were thought.” But it was not for this, the work of his earlier years,
that the reputation of Góngora has been spread over the world, but
because he, to steal an image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the
side of Parnassus, as the inventor of “El Culteranismo” or “Góngorism.”
At some period in his life he began to write in this style. Hostile
critics say he did so because he could not attract sufficient attention
by writing with sanity. Admirers have asserted that he had a literary
ambition to improve the poetic language of Spain, to make it, in fact,
more _culto_--more cultivated. The question what exactly Góngorism
was, will be best answered by an example. Here, for instance, is a
passage from the _Pyramus and Thisbe_, a short poem, published in 1636
by his admirer Cristobal de Salazar Mardones, with a wordy commentary
of incredible pomposity, and futility. The English translation is put
below the Spanish on the Hamiltonian system, and the reader is begged
to observe that the inversions and transpositions are only a little
more violent in English than in Spanish:--
Piramo fueron y Tisbe,
_Pyramus they were and Tisbe,_
Los que en verso hizo culto
_Those who in verse made[16] polished_
El Licenciado Nason
_The Licentiate Naso_
Bien romo ó bien narigudo
_Maybe snub, maybe beak_
Dejar el dulce candor
_To leave the sweet white_
Lastimosamente obscuro
_Lamentably dark_
Al que, túmulo de seda,
_Of that which, tomb of silk,_
Fue de los dos casquilucios
_Was of the two feather-heads_
Moral que los hospedó
_Mulberry which gave them shelter_
Y fue condenando al punto
_And was condemned at once_
Si del Tigris no en raizes
_If by the Tigris not in root_
De los amantes en frutos.
_By the lovers in fruit._
Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in prose, and with copious
references to Ovid, _Meta._, lib. iv., that what this means is that
the mulberry-tree was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the
Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers. The reader will
see at once that this is puerile nonsense, and that it is a mere trick.
It is also a very old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse riddles
adorn the _Heimskringla_, wrote of a certain king--
“Now hath befallen
In Frodi’s house
The word of fate
To fall on Fiolnir;
That the windless wave
Of the wild bull’s spears
That lord should do
To death by drowning,”--
he was writing in “góngorina especie”--that is, in what was to be the
manner of Góngora. The whole secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed,
pointed out, in never calling anything by its right name, and in
transposing words violently. Given a great deal of bad taste, and
a puerile mania for making people stare, and the thing is easily
accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead
which men drink out of horns “the windless wave of the wild bull’s
spear,” or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though
the mistake was incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin than
in Góngora, and the Norseman seems on the whole to have been the least
silly of the two. The comparison which has been made between Góngorism
and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to the Spaniards, in
whom there was absolutely nothing but juggling with words.
This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of Italian models had
done. It was in vain that Lope argued against it for common-sense. He
was himself conquered. Quevedo,[17] who attacked it, was driven to
worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means of another
affectation, the _conceptista_, or conceited style, which is more like
our “metaphysical” manner, but never had the popularity of Góngorism.
The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of
Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name
of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis de
Leon, and were free from either kind of fault; but the learned poetry
of Spain had not vitality enough to throw off the disease. Góngorism
became the literary taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.
[SN: _The Epics._]
The great mass of epics, or so-called epics,[18] which form the
non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain, belong with rare
exceptions, if not with only one exception, to the domains of
bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that I do not speak with
any personal knowledge of the _Carolea_ of Hierónimo Sempere, published
in 1560, or many others, and with only a slight acquaintance with the
_Carlo Famoso_ of Don Luis de Zapata. This second poem, published in
1565, is in 50 cantos, and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is
the history of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a
specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The _Carlo Famoso_ is
essentially prose, disguised in such _ottava rima_ stanzas as any one
who had once acquired the trick could probably write as easily as prose
pure and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served the emperor, had
been content to tell us of what he saw in prose, he would probably have
left a readable, and perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, he
felt called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of Ariosto, and
this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which
the Don Luis de Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to
handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish,
the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to
the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on
historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could.
Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of
Famous Men of the Indies--_Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias_--of
Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical
value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown,
was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could
in a fashion write _ottava rima_ stanza. He seems to have thought that
“Elegy” meant much the same thing as “Eulogy,” and his _Elegias_ are,
in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried
down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crown
octavo volume of 563 pages in double columns. Of course there are by
the side of work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious
or humorous, which have no pretensions to a historical character.
Here it was only to be expected that Lope de Vega would be among the
most fluent and the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he
tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The epics in the Italian
form being popular, he wrote several; and as he had an unparallelled
command of facile verse which always stopped short of becoming bad,
he is never unreadable, though, as he was also only a very superior
_improvisatore_, his poems never quite compel reading. The subject of
the _Dragontea_--the last cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in
1594--is so much more attractive to an Englishman than the _Angelicas_
and _Jerusalem Conquistadas_, taken from Ariosto and Tasso, that one
is perhaps prejudiced in its favour. And yet it seems to me to have
a certain vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means
inferior to them in other respects.[20]
[SN: _The_ Araucana.]
The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-natured acquiescence
of foreigners have given the name of epic to the _Araucana_ of Alonso
de Ercilla.[21] The author was a very typical Spaniard of his century.
He was born in 1533, and came to England as page to Philip of Spain
at the time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from England that
he sailed to Chili for the purpose of helping in the suppression of
the revolt of the Araucans, which, became the subject of his poem.
While on service he was condemned to death for drawing his sword on a
brother officer. The sentence was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so
bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the Marquis
of Cañete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the
remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to
secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling
his great _Araucana_. It appeared in three parts in 1569, 1575, and
1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather
and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to
the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the _Araucana_
can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to
print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen for himself.
The first part is almost wholly occupied with the skirmishes of the
Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper
epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the tyranny of a
fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of _ottava rima_ stanzas, he
wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality.
Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior version
of the _Varones Ilustres_ of Castellanos, at its weakest an echo of
the Italians. The literature of the world would have been richer, not
poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French
contemporary Monluc.
The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had
its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de
Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for
literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and
Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My
own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads
me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led
him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the
language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance
must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general
literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all
Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have
naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having
no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the
Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner
and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain
and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese
would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be
spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and
literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the
pre-eminence which mediæval French had had among neighbouring peoples.
Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian--even
Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity
of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has
escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the
sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a
world-wide reputation.”
[SN: _The_ Lusiads.]
It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works
of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of
admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have
to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no
doubt better, judges have felt for the _Lusiads_.[23] The pathetic
circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580),
are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in
favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the
East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in
extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the _Lusiads_ is supplied
by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope;
but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and
the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator.
The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under
correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which
has been claimed for the _Lusiads_ is not great in a writer who had
Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent
narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied--and no one
need wish to deny--that Camoens wrote his own language with great
purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than
bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real
tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism
is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are
fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the _Lusiads_ suffer
from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language
and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish
imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with
the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many
precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us
endure its essential absurdity. The _Lusiads_ has, in fact, the defect
of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula--that it is very much of a
school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and
transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had
any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in
the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]
The reader who compares the _Lusiads_, not with the _Faërie Queen_,
which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature,
but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs,
the purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according
to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud
calls made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following
stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, _ottava rima_, full of matter
which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then
appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages. Now and
then he will find incidents--the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for
example, and the episode of the island of Love--where the intention
to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity,
and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is
what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again
there are better and more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the
whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was a real poet,
though of no wide scope, who could express a certain tenderness and
melancholy in forms he had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his
great name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his country can
quote as worthy to rank with the great poets of the world. Therefore
he has a whole nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned to
contradict.[25]
FOOTNOTES:
[5] I have used the first edition of Boscan, Barcelona, 1543, but have
seen mention of a modern reprint by William J. Knapp, Madrid, 1875.
[6] _Tesoro del Parnaso Español_ of Quintana, 41-51. _Biblioteca de
Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[7] The _Arte Poética Española_, which goes under the name of Juan Diaz
Rengifo, a schoolmaster of Ávila, is believed to have been written by
his brother Alfonso, a Jesuit. With the addition of a dictionary of
rhymes, it became the handbook of Spanish poetasters, a numerous tribe.
It appeared at Salamanca in 1592.
[8] The _Egemplar Poético_ is the first piece quoted in vol. viii. of
the _Parnaso Español_ of Sedaño, 1774.
[9] This seems the most convenient place to note that fairly
ample specimens of Spanish literature will be found in the very
useful collection known as the _Biblioteca de Aribau_, or _de
Ribadeneyra_--seventy-one somewhat ponderous volumes printed with
middling skill on poor paper. The texts are the best where few are
really good, and the introductions of value. It is well indexed. I
prefer to make my references to this rather than to earlier editions
or better editions published by societies, and therefore not easily
accessible in this country.
[10] A very interesting study of this phase of Spanish poetry, and some
account of its writers, will be found in the introduction written by M.
Alfred Morel-Fatio to his reprint of a _Cancionero General_ of 1535, in
his _L’Espagne au XVI^{me}. et au XVII^{me}. Siècle_. Heilbronn, 1878.
[11] _Parnaso Español_ of Sedaño, vol. vii.; and _Ribadeneyra_, vol.
xxxii.; _Poetas Liricos de los Siglos_, xvi., xvii.
[12] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxvii., contains the work of
Luis de Leon, both prose and verse, together with a selection from the
papers of his trial before the Inquisition.
[13] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[14] The reference is again to _Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxxii., xlii.
[15] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xxxii.
[16] “Made” is the past tense of the verb. The order is “made to
leave,” which is shown by the inflection in Spanish.
[17] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vols. xxiii., xlviii., lxix. There is
a very pretty edition of Quevedo in eleven octavo volumes, by Sancha,
Madrid, 1791, which is occasionally met with.
[18] Vols. xvii. and xix. of the _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_ contain
not only all, but more than all, that is entitled to survive of this
portion of Spanish literature.
[19] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. iv.
[20] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra._ _Obras no dramaticas de Lope de
Vega_; also, _Obras Sueltas_. Madrid, 1776-1779.
[21] _Biblioteca de Ribadeneyra_, vol. xvii.
[22] Article on Portuguese Literature in the _Quarterly_ for May 1809.
[23] The general reader cannot do better than make his acquaintance
with the _Lusiads_ in Mr Aubertin’s translation, which gives the
Portuguese text opposite the English version.
[24] Whether because the subject is maritime, or in consequence of
our long trading and fighting alliance with Portugal, the _Lusiads_
has been translated into English with an almost curious persistence.
Sir Richard Fanshawe made a very quaint version in the middle of the
seventeenth century. The flowing, and extremely free, translation of
Mickle proved lucrative to its author as late as 1776. In our time Mr
Aubertin has translated it closely, and Sir Richard Burton has given a
version both of the _Lusiads_ and of the minor poems which is admirably
fitted to introduce the English reader--to the translator.
[25] _Obras de Camoens._ Lisbon, 1782-1783.