the men, and the _cazuela_, or “stewpan,” where the women were strictly
inclosed, and sat crowded together by themselves. Above all these
different classes were the _desvanes_ and _aposentos_, or balconies
and rooms, whose open, shop-like windows extended round three sides of
the court-yard in different stories, and were filled by those persons
of both sexes who could afford such a luxury, and who not unfrequently
thought it one of so much consequence, that they held it as an heirloom
from generation to generation.[748] The _aposentos_ were, in fact,
commodious rooms, and the ladies who resorted to them generally went
masked, as neither the actors nor the audience were always so decent
that the ladylike modesty of the more courtly portion of society might
be willing to countenance them.[749]
[748] Aarsens, Relation, p. 59. Zavaleta, Dia de Fiesta por la
Tarde, Madrid, 1660, 12mo, pp. 4, 8, 9. C. Pellicer, Tom. I. Mad.
d’Aulnoy, Tom. III. p. 22.
[749] Guillen de Castro, “Mal Casadas de Valencia,” Jorn. II.
It may be worth notice, perhaps, that the traditions of the
Spanish theatre are still true to its origin;--_aposentos_, or
apartments, being still the name for the boxes; _patio_, or
court-yard, that of the pit; and _mosqueteros_, or musketeers,
that of the persons who fill the pit, and who still claim many
privileges, as the successors of those who stood in the heat of
the old court-yard. As to the _cazuela_, Breton de los Herreros,
in his spirited “Sátira contra los Abusos en el Arte de la
Declamacion Teatral,” (Madrid, 1834, 12mo), says:--
Tal vez alguna insípida mozuela
De tí se prende; mas si el _Patio_ brama,
Que te vale un rincon de la _Cazuela_?
But this part of the theatre is more respectable than it was in
the seventeenth century.
It was deemed a distinction to have free access to the theatre; and
persons who cared little about the price of a ticket struggled hard to
obtain it.[750] Those who paid at all paid twice,--at the outer door,
where the manager sometimes collected his claims in person, and at
the inner one, where an ecclesiastic collected what belonged to the
hospitals, under the gentler name of alms.[751] The audiences were
often noisy and unjust. Cervantes intimates this, and Lope directly
complains of it. Suarez de Figueroa says, that rattles, crackers,
bells, whistles, and keys were all put in requisition, when it was
desired to make an uproar; and Benavente, in a _loa_ spoken at the
opening of a theatrical campaign at Madrid by Roque, the friend of
Lope de Vega, deprecates the ill-humor of all the various classes
of his audience, from the fashionable world in the _aposentos_ to
the _mosqueteros_ in the court-yard; though, he adds, with some mock
dignity, that he little fears the hisses which he is aware must
follow such a defiance.[752] When the audience meant to applaud,
they cried “_Victor!_” and were no less tumultuous and unruly than
when they hissed.[753] In Cervantes’s time, after the play was over,
if it had been successful, the author stood at the door to receive
the congratulations of the crowd as they came out; and, later, his
name was placarded and paraded at the corners of the streets with an
annunciation of his triumph.[754]
[750] Zabaleta, Dia de Fiesta por la Tarde, p. 2.
[751] Cervantes, Viage al Parnaso, 1784, p. 148.
[752] Cervantes, Prólogo á las Comedias. Lope, Prefaces to
several of his plays. Figueroa, Pasagero, 1617, p. 105.
Benavente, Joco-Seria, Valladolid, 1653, 12mo, f. 81. One of the
ways in which the audiences expressed their disapprobation was,
as Cervantes intimates, by throwing cucumbers (_pepinos_) at the
actors.
[753] Mad. d’Aulnoy, Voyage, Tom. I. p. 55. Tirso de Molina,
Deleytar, Madrid, 1765, 4to, Tom. II. p. 333. At the end of a
play the _whole_ audience is not unfrequently appealed to for
a “Victor” by the second-rate authors, as we have seen the
_mosqueteros_ were sometimes, though rarely. Diego de Figueroa,
at the conclusion of his “Hija del Mesonero,” (Comedias
Escogidas, Tom. XIV., 1662, p. 182), asks for it as for an alms,
“Dadle un Vitor de limosna”; and Rodrigo Enriquez, in his “Sufrir
mas por querer menos,” (Tom. X., 1658, p. 222), asks for it as
for the vails given to servants in a gaming-house, “Venga un
Vitor de barato.” Sometimes a good deal of ingenuity is used to
bring in the word _Vitor_ just at the end of the piece, so that
it shall be echoed by the audience without an open demand for
it, as it is by Calderon in his “Amado y Aborrecido,” and in
the “Difunta Pleyteada” of Francisco de Roxas. But, in general,
when it is asked for at all, it is rather claimed as a right.
Once, in “Lealtad contra su Rey,” by Juan de Villegas, (Comedias
Escogidas, Tom. X., 1658), the two actors who end the piece
impertinently ask the applause for themselves, and not for the
author; a jest which was, no doubt, well received.
[754] Cervantes, Viage, 1784, p. 138. Novelas, 1783, Tom. I. p.
40.
Cosmé de Oviedo, a well-known manager at Granada, was the first who
used advertisements for announcing the play that was to be acted. This
was about the year 1600. Half a century afterwards, the condition
of such persons was still so humble, that one of the best of them
went round the city and posted his play-bills himself, which were,
probably, written, and not printed.[755] From an early period they
seem to have given to acted plays the title which full-length Spanish
dramas almost uniformly bore during the seventeenth century and even
afterwards,--that of _comedia famosa_;--though we must except from
this remark the case of Tirso de Molina, who amused himself with
calling more than one of his successful performances “Comedia _sin_
fama,”[756]--a play without repute. But this was, in truth, a matter
of mere form, soon understood by the public, who needed no especial
excitement to bring them to theatrical entertainments, for which they
were constitutionally eager. Some of the audience went early to secure
good places, and amused themselves with the fruit and confectionery
carried round the court-yard for sale, or with watching the movements
of the laughing dames who were inclosed within the balustrade of the
_cazuela_, and who were but too ready to flirt with all in their
neighbourhood. Others came late; and if they were persons of authority
or consequence, the actors waited for their appearance till the
disorderly murmurs of the groundlings compelled them to begin.[757]
[755] Roxas, Viage, 1614, f. 51. Benavente, Joco-Seria, 1653,
f. 78. Alonso, Mozo de Muchos Amos;--by which (Tom. I. f. 137)
it appears that the placards were written as late as 1624, in
Seville.
[756] This title he gave to “Como han de ser los Amigos,” “Amor
por Razon de Estado,” and some others of his plays. It may
be noted that a full-length play was sometimes called _Gran_
Comedia, as twelve such are in Tom. XXXI. of “Las Mejores
Comedias que hasta oy han salido,” Barcelona, 1638.
[757] Mad. d’Aulnoy, Voyage, Tom. III. p. 22, and Zabaleta,
Fiesta por la Tarde, 1660, pp. 4, 9.
At last, though not always till the rabble had been composed by the
recitation of a favorite ballad or by some popular air on the guitars,
one of the more respectable actors, and often the manager himself,
appeared on the stage, and, in the technical phrase, “threw out the
_loa_” or compliment,[758]--a peculiarly Spanish form of the prologue,
of which we have abundant specimens from the time of Naharro, who calls
them _intróytos_, or overtures, down to the final fall of the old
drama. They are prefixed to all the _autos_ of Lope and Calderon; and
though, in the case of the multitudinous secular plays of the Spanish
theatre, the appropriate _loas_ are no longer found regularly attached
to each, yet we have them occasionally with the dramas of Tirso de
Molina, Calderon, Antonio de Mendoza, and not a few others.
[758] Cigarrales de Toledo, Madrid, 1624, 4to, p. 99. There is
a good deal of learning about _loas_ in Pinciano, “Filosofía
Antigua,” Madrid, 1596, 4to, p. 413, and Salas, “Tragedia
Antigua,” Madrid, 1633, 4to, p. 184.
The best are those of Agustin de Roxas, whose “Amusing Travels” are
full of them, and those of Quiñones de Benavente, found among his
“Jests in Earnest.” They were in different forms, dramatic, narrative,
and lyrical, and on very various subjects and in very various measures.
One of Tirso’s is in praise of the beautiful ladies who were present at
its representation;[759]--one of Mendoza’s is in honor of the capture
of Breda, and flatters the national vanity upon the recent successes
of the Marquis of Spinola;[760]--one by Roxas is on the glories of
Seville, where he made it serve as a conciliatory introduction for
himself and his company, when they were about to act there;[761]--one
by Sanchez is a jesting account of the actors who were to perform in
the play that was to follow it;[762]--and one by Benavente was spoken
by Roque de Figueroa, when he began a series of representations at
court, and is devoted to a pleasant exposition of the strength of his
company, and a boastful announcement of the new dramas they were able
to produce.[763]
[759] The _loa_ to the “Vergonzoso en Palacio”: it is in _décimas
redondillas_.
[760] It gives an account of the reception of the news at the
palace, (Obras de Mendoza, Lisboa, 1690, 4to, p. 78), and may
have been spoken before Calderon’s well-known play, “El Sitio de
Breda.”
[761] Four persons appear in this _loa_,--a part of which is
sung,--and, at the end, Seville enters and grants them all leave
to act in her city. Viage, 1614, ff. 4-8.
[762] Lyra Poética de Vicente Sanchez, Zaragoza, 1688, 4to, p. 47.
[763] Joco-Seria, 1653, ff. 77, 82. In another he parodies some
of the familiar old ballads (ff. 43, etc.) in a way that must
have been very amusing to the _mosqueteros_: a practice not
uncommon in the lighter dramas of the Spanish stage, most of
which are lost. Instances of it are found in the _entremes_ of
“Melisandra,” by Lope (Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1609, p.
333); and two burlesque dramas in Comedias Escogidas, Tom. XLV.,
1679,--the first entitled “Traycion en Propria Sangre,” being a
parody on the ballads of the “Infantes de Lara,” and the other
entitled “El Amor mas Verdadero,” a parody on the ballads of
“Durandarte” and “Belerma”;--both very extravagant and dull, but
showing the tendencies of the popular taste not a whit the less.
Gradually, however, the _loas_, whose grand object was to conciliate
the audience, took more and more the popular dramatic form; and at
last, like several by Roxas, Mira de Mescua, Moreto, and Lope de
Vega,[764] differed little from the farces that followed them.[765]
Indeed, they were almost always fitted to the particular occasions that
called them forth, or to the known demands of the audience;--some of
them being accompanied with singing and dancing, and others ending with
rude practical jests.[766] They are, therefore, as various in their
tone as they are in their forms; and, from this circumstance, as well
as from their easy national humor, they became at last an important
part of all dramatic representations.
[764] These curious _loas_ are found in a rare volume, called
“Autos Sacramentales, con Quatro Comedias Nuevas y sus Loas y
Entremeses,” Madrid, 1655, 4to.
[765] A _loa_ entitled “El Cuerpo de Guardia,” by Luis Enriquez
de Fonseca, and performed by an amateur company at Naples on
Easter eve, 1669, in honor of the queen of Spain, is as long as a
_saynete_, and much like one. It is--together with another _loa_
and several curious _bayles_--part of a play on the subject of
Viriatus, entitled “The Spanish Hannibal,” and to be found in a
collection of his poems, less in the Italian manner than might be
expected from a Spaniard who lived and wrote in Italy. Fonseca
published the volume containing them all at Naples, in 1683,
4to, and called it “Ocios de los Estudios”; a volume not worth
reading, and yet not wholly to be passed over.
[766] Roxas, Viage, ff. 189-193.
The first _jornada_ or act of the principal performance followed the
_loa_, almost as a matter of course, though, in some instances, a dance
was interposed; and in others, Figueroa complains, that he had been
obliged still to listen to a ballad before he was permitted to reach
the regular drama which he had come to hear;[767]--so importunate were
the audience for what was lightest and most amusing. At the end of the
first act, though perhaps preceded by another dance, came the first of
the two _entremeses_,--a sort of “crutches,” as the editor of Benavente
well calls them, “that were given to the heavy _comedias_ to keep them
from falling.”
[767] Cigarrales de Toledo, 1624, pp. 104 and 403. Figueroa,
Pasagero, 1617, f. 109. b.
Nothing can well be gayer or more free than these favorite
entertainments, which were generally written in the genuine Castilian
idiom and spirit.[768] At first, they were farces, or parts of farces,
taken from Lope de Rueda and his school; but afterwards, Lope de Vega,
Cervantes, and the other writers for the theatre composed _entremeses_
better suited to the changed character of the dramas in their
times.[769] Their subjects were generally chosen from the adventures
of the lower classes of society, whose manners and follies they
ridiculed; many of the earlier of the sort ending, as one of the Dogs
in Cervantes’s dialogue complains that they did too often, with vulgar
scuffles and blows.[770] But later, they became more poetical, and
were mingled with allegory, song, and dance; taking, in fact, whatever
forms and tone were deemed most attractive. They seldom exceeded a few
minutes in length, and never had any other purpose than to relieve the
attention of the audience, which it was supposed might have been taxed
too much by the graver action that had preceded them.[771] With this
action they had, properly, nothing to do;--though in one instance
Calderon has ingeniously made his _entremes_ serve as a graceful
conclusion to one of the acts of the principal drama.[772]
[768] Sarmiento, the literary historian and critic, in a letter
cited in the “Declamacion contra los Abusos de la Lengua
Castellana,” (Madrid, 1793, 4to, p. 149), says: “I never knew
what the true Castilian idiom was till I read _entremeses_.”
[769] The origin of _entremeses_ is distinctly set forth
in Lope’s “Arte Nuevo de hacer Comedias”; and both the
first and third volumes of his collection of plays contain
_entremeses_; besides which, several are to be found in his
Obras Sueltas;--almost all of them amusing. The _entremeses_ of
Cervantes are at the end of his Comedias, 1615.
[770] Novelas, 1783, Tom. II. p. 441. “Coloquio de los Perros.”
[771] A good many are to be found in the “Joco-Seria” of Quiñones
de Benavente. Those by Cancer are in the Autos, etc., 1655, cited
in note 44.
[772] “El Castillo de Lindabridis,” end of Act I. There is an
_entremes_ called “The Chestnut Girl,” very amusing as far as the
spirited dialogue is concerned, but immoral enough in the story,
to be found in Chap. 15 of the “Bachiller Trapaza.”
The second act was followed by a similar _entremes_, music, and
dancing;[773] and after the third, the poetical part of the
entertainment was ended with a _saynete_ or _bonne bouche_, first so
called by Benavente, but differing from the _entremeses_ only in name,
and written best by Cancer, Deza y Avila, and Benavente himself,--in
short, by those who best succeeded in the _entremeses_.[774] Last of
all came a national dance, which never failed to delight the audience
of all classes, and served to send them home in good-humor when the
entertainment was over.[775]
[773] Mad. d’Aulnoy, Tom. I. p. 56.
[774] C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. I. p. 277. The _entremeses_ of
Cancer are to be found in his Obras, Madrid, 1761, 4to; those of
Deza y Avila, in his “Donayres de Tersicore,” 1663; and those
of Benavente, in his “Joco-Seria,” 1653. The volume of Deza
y Avila--marked Vol. I., but I think the only one that ever
appeared--is almost filled with light, short compositions for the
theatre, under the name of _bayles_, _entremeses_, _saynetes_,
and _mogigangas_; the last being a sort of _mumming_. Some of
them are good; all are characteristic of the state of the theatre
in the middle of the seventeenth century.
[775]
Al fin con un baylezito
Iba la gente contenta.
Roxas, Viage, 1614, f. 48.
Dancing, indeed, was very early an important part of theatrical
exhibitions in Spain, even of the religious, and its importance has
continued down to the present day. This was natural. From the first
intimations of history and tradition in antiquity, dancing was the
favorite amusement of the rude inhabitants of the country;[776] and,
so far as modern times are concerned, dancing has been to Spain what
music has been to Italy, a passion with the whole population. In
consequence of this, it finds a place in the dramas of Enzina, Vicente,
and Naharro; and, from the time of Lope de Rueda and Lope de Vega,
appears in some part, and often in several parts, of all theatrical
exhibitions. An amusing instance of the slight grounds on which it was
introduced may be found in “The Grand Sultana” of Lope de Vega, where
one of the actors says,--
There ne’er was born a Spanish woman yet
But she was born to dance;
and a specimen is immediately given in proof of the assertion.[777]
[776] The Gaditanæ Puellæ were the most famous; but see, on the
whole subject of the old Spanish dances, the notes to Juvenal, by
Ruperti, Lipsiæ, 1801, 8vo, Sat. XI. vv. 162-164, and the curious
discussion by Salas, “Nueva Idea de la Tragedia Antigua,” 1633,
pp. 127, 128. Gifford, in his remarks on the passage in Juvenal,
(Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Philadelphia, 1803, 8vo,
Vol. II. p. 159), thinks that it refers to “neither more nor less
than the _fandango_, which still forms the delight of all ranks
in Spain,” and that in the phrase “_testarum crepitus_” he hears
“the clicking of the castanets, which accompanies the dance.”
[777] Jornada III. Every body danced. The Duke of Lerma was said
to be the best dancer of his time, being premier to Philip IV.,
and afterwards a cardinal. Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. VI.,
1839, p. 272.
Many of these dances, and probably nearly all of them that were
introduced on the stage, were accompanied with words, and were what
Cervantes calls “recited dances.”[778] Such were the well-known
“Xacaras,”--roystering ballads, in the dialect of the rogues,--which
took their name from the bullies who sung them, and were at one time
rivals for favor with the regular _entremeses_.[779] Such, too, were
the more famous “Zarabandas”; graceful, but voluptuous dances, that
were known from about 1588, and, as Mariana says, received their name
from a devil in woman’s shape at Seville, though elsewhere they are
said to have derived it from a similar personage found at Guayaquil
in America.[780] Another dance, full of a mad revelry, in which the
audience were ready sometimes to join, was called “Alemana,” probably
from its German origin, and was one of those whose discontinuance
Lope, himself a great lover of dancing, always regretted.[781] Another
was “Don Alonso el Bueno,” so named from the ballad that accompanied
it; and yet others were called “El Caballero,” “La Carretería,” “Las
Gambetas,” “Hermano Bartolo,” and “La Zapateta.”[782]
[778] “Danzas _habladas_” is the singular phrase applied to a
pantomime with singing and dancing in Don Quixote, Parte II. c.
20. The _bayles_ of Fonseca, referred to in a preceding note,
are a fair specimen of the singing and dancing on the Spanish
stage in the middle of the seventeenth century. One of them is
an allegorical contest between Love and Fortune; another, a
discussion on Jealousy; and the third, a wooing by Peter Crane, a
peasant, carried on by shaking a purse before the damsel he would
win;--all three in the ballad measure, and none of them extending
beyond a hundred and twenty lines, or possessing any merit but a
few jests.
[779] Some of them are very brutal, like one at the end of
“Crates y Hipparchia,” Madrid, 1636, 12mo; one in the “Enano
de las Musas”; and several in the “Ingeniosa Helena.” The best
are in Quiñones de Benavente, “Joco-Seria,” 1653, and Solís,
“Poesías,” 1716. There was originally a distinction between
_bayles_ and _danzas_, now no longer recognized;--the _danzas_
being graver and more decent. See a note of Pellicer to Don
Quixote, Parte II. c. 48; partly discredited by one of Clemencin
on the same passage.
[780] Covarrubias, ad verbum _Çarabanda_. Pellicer, Don Quixote,
1797, Tom. I. pp. cliii.-clvi., and Tom. V. p. 102. There is a
list of many ballads that were sung with the _zarabandas_ in a
curious satire entitled “The Life and Death of La Zarabanda,
Wife of Anton Pintado,” 1603;--the ballads being given as a
bequest of the deceased lady. (C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. I. pp.
129-131, 136-138.) Lopez Pinciano, in his “Filosofía Antigua
Poética,” 1596, pp. 418-420, partly describes the _zarabanda_,
and expresses his great disgust at its indecency.
[781] Dorotea, Acto I. sc. 5.
[782] Other names of dances are to be found in the “Diablo
Cojuelo,” Tranco I., where all of them are represented as
inventions of the Devil on Two Sticks; but these are the chief.
See, also, Covarrubias, Art. _Zapato_.
Most of them were free or licentious in their tendency. Guevara says
that the Devil invented them all; and Cervantes, in one of his farces,
admits that the Zarabanda, which was the most obnoxious to censure,
could, indeed, have had no better origin.[783] Lope, however, was not
so severe in his judgment. He declares that the dances accompanied
by singing were better than the _entremeses_, which, he adds
disparagingly, dealt only in hungry men, thieves, and brawlers.[784]
But whatever may have been individual opinions about them, they
occasioned great scandal, and, in 1621, kept their place on the theatre
only by a vigorous exertion of the popular will in opposition to the
will of the government. As it was, they were for a time restrained and
modified; but still no one of them was absolutely exiled, except the
licentious Zarabanda,--many of the crowds that thronged the court-yards
thinking, with one of their leaders, that the dances were the salt
of the plays, and that the theatre would be good for nothing without
them.[785]
[783] Cuevas de Salamanca. There is a curious _bayle entremesado_
of Moreto, on the subject of Don Rodrigo and La Cava, in the
Autos, etc., 1655, f. 92; and another, called “El Médico,” in the
“Ocios de Ignacio Alvarez Pellicer,” s. l. 1685, 4to, p. 51.
[784] See the “Gran Sultana,” as already cited, note 57.
[785] C. Pellicer, Orígen, Tom. I. p. 102.
Indeed, in all its forms, and in all its subsidiary attractions of
ballads, _entremeses_ and _saynetes_, music, and dancing, the old
Spanish drama was essentially a popular entertainment, governed by
the popular will. In any other country, under the same circumstances,
it would hardly have risen above the condition in which it was left
by Lope de Rueda, when it was the amusement of the lowest classes of
the populace. But the Spaniards have always been a poetical people.
There is a romance in their early history, and a picturesqueness
in their very costume and manners, that cannot be mistaken. A deep
enthusiasm runs, like a vein of pure and rich ore, at the bottom of
their character, and the workings of strong passions and an original
imagination are everywhere visible among the wild elements that break
out on its surface. The same energy, the same fancy, the same excited
feelings, which, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries,
produced the most various and rich popular ballads of modern times,
were not yet stilled or quenched in the seventeenth. The same national
character, which, under Saint Ferdinand and his successors, drove the
Moorish crescent through the plains of Andalusia, and found utterance
for its exultation in poetry of such remarkable sweetness and power,
was still active under the Philips, and called forth, directed, and
controlled a dramatic literature which grew out of the national genius
and the condition of the mass of the people, and which, therefore, in
all its forms and varieties, is essentially and peculiarly Spanish.
Under an impulse so wide and deep, the number of dramatic authors would
naturally be great. As early as 1605, when the theatre, such as it had
been constituted by Lope de Vega, had existed hardly more than fifteen
years, we can easily see, by the discussions in the first part of Don
Quixote, that it already filled a large space in the interests of the
time; and from the Prólogo prefixed by Cervantes to his plays in 1615,
it is quite plain that its character and success were already settled,
and that no inconsiderable number of its best authors had already
appeared. Even as early as this, dramas were composed in the lower
classes of society. Villegas tells us of a tailor of Toledo who wrote
many; Guevara gives a similar account of a sheep-shearer at Ecija; and
Figueroa, of a well-known tradesman of Seville;--all in full accordance
with the representations made in Don Quixote concerning the shepherd
Chrisóstomo, and the whole current of the story and conversations of
the actors in the “Journey” of Roxas.[786] In this state of things,
the number of writers for the theatre went on increasing out of all
proportion to their increase in other countries, as appears from the
lists given by Lope de Vega, in 1630; by Montalvan, in 1632, when
we find seventy-six dramatic poets living in Castile alone; and by
Antonio, about 1660. During the whole of this century, therefore, we
may regard the theatre as a part of the popular character in Spain,
and as having become, in the proper sense of the word, more truly a
national theatre than any other that has been produced in modern times.
[786] Figueroa, Pasagero, 1617, f. 105. Villegas, Eróticas
Najera, 1617, 4to, Tom. II. p. 29. Diablo Cojuelo, Tranco V.
Figueroa, Plaza Universal, Madrid, 1733, folio, Discurso 91.
It might naturally have been foreseen, that, upon a movement like this,
imparted and sustained by all the force of the national genius, any
accidents of patronage or opposition would produce little effect. And
so in fact it proved. The ecclesiastical authorities always frowned
upon it, and sometimes placed themselves so as directly to resist
its progress; but its sway and impulse were so heavy, that it passed
over their opposition, in every instance, as over a slight obstacle.
Nor was it more affected by the seductions of patronage. Philip the
Fourth, for above forty years, favored and supported it with princely
munificence. He built splendid saloons for it in his palaces; he wrote
for it; he acted in improvisated dramas. The reigning favorite, the
Count Duke Olivares, to flatter the royal taste, invented new dramatic
luxuries, such as that of magnificent floating theatres on the stream
of the Tormés, and on the sheets of water in the gardens of the Buen
Retiro. All royal entertainments seemed, in fact, for a time, to take
a dramatic tone, or tend to it. But still the popular character of the
theatre itself was unchecked and unaffected;--still the plays acted in
the royal theatres, before the principal persons in the kingdom, were
the same with those performed before the populace in the court-yards of
Madrid;--and when other times and other princes came, the old Spanish
drama left the halls and palaces, where it had been so long flattered,
with as little of a courtly air as that with which it had originally
entered them.[787]
[787] Mad. d’Aulnoy, fresh from the stage of Racine and Molière,
then the most refined and best appointed in Europe, speaks with
great admiration of the theatres in the Spanish palaces, though
she ridicules those granted to the public. (Voyage, etc., ed.
1693, Tom. III. p. 7, and elsewhere.) One way, however, in
which the kings patronized the drama was, probably, not very
agreeable to the authors, if it were often practised; I mean
that of requiring a piece to be acted nowhere but in the royal
presence. This was the case with Gerónimo de Villayzan’s “Sufrir
mas por querer mas.” Comedias por Diferentes Autores, Tom. XXV.,
Zaragoza, 1633, f. 145. b.
The same impulse that made it so powerful in other respects filled the
old Spanish theatre with an almost incredible number of cavalier and
heroic dramas, dramas for saints, sacramental _autos_, _entremeses_,
and farces of all names. Their whole amount, at the beginning of the
eighteenth century, has been estimated to exceed thirty thousand, of
which four thousand eight hundred by unknown authors had been, at one
time, collected by a single person in Madrid.[788] Their character and
merit were, as we have seen, very various. Still, the circumstance,
that they were all written substantially for one object and under one
system of opinions, gave them a stronger air of general resemblance
than might otherwise have been anticipated. For it should never be
forgotten, that the Spanish drama in its highest and most heroic
forms was still a popular entertainment, just as it was in its farces
and ballads. Its purpose was, not only to please all classes, but to
please all equally;--those who paid three maravedís, and stood crowded
together under a hot sun in the court-yard, as well as the rank and
fashion, that lounged in their costly apartments above, and amused
themselves hardly less with the picturesque scene of the audiences in
the _patio_ than with that of the actors on the stage. Whether the
story this mass of people saw enacted were probable or not was to them
a matter of small consequence. But it was necessary that it should be
interesting. Above all, it was necessary that it should be Spanish;
and therefore, though its subject might be Greek or Roman, Oriental or
mythological, the characters represented were always Castilian, and
Castilian after the fashion of the seventeenth century,--governed by
Castilian notions of gallantry and the Castilian point of honor.
[788] Schack’s Geschichte der dramat. Lit. in Spanien, Berlin,
1846, Tom. III. 8vo, pp. 22-24; a work of great value.
It was the same with their costumes. Coriolanus was dressed like Don
John of Austria; Aristotle came on the stage with a curled periwig and
buckles in his shoes, like a Spanish Abbé; and Madame d’Aulnoy says,
the Devil she saw was dressed like any other Castilian gentleman,
except that his stockings were flame-colored and he wore horns.[789]
But however the actors might be dressed, or however the play might
confound geography and history, or degrade heroism by caricature,
still, in a great majority of cases, dramatic situations are skilfully
produced; the story, full of bustle and incident, grows more and more
urgent as it advances; and the result of the whole is, that, though we
may sometimes have been much offended, we are sorry we have reached the
conclusion, and find on looking back that we have almost always been
excited, and often pleased.
[789] Relation du Voyage d’Espagne, ed. 1693, Tom. I. p. 55.
The Spanish theatre, in many of its attributes and characteristics,
stands, therefore, by itself. It takes no cognizance of ancient
example; for the spirit of antiquity could have little in common with
materials so modern, Christian, and romantic. It borrowed nothing from
the drama of France or of Italy; for it was in advance of both when
its final character was not only developed, but settled. And as for
England, though Shakspeare and Lope were contemporaries, and there
are points of resemblance between them which it is pleasant to trace
and difficult to explain, still they and their schools, undoubtedly,
had not the least influence on each other. The Spanish drama is,
therefore, entirely national. Many of its best subjects are taken from
the chronicles and traditions familiar to the audience that listened
to them, and its prevalent versification reminded the hearers, by its
sweetness and power, of what had so often moved their hearts in the
earliest outpourings of the national genius. With all its faults, then,
this old Spanish drama, founded on the great traits of the national
character, maintained itself in the popular favor as long as that
character existed in its original attributes; and even now it remains
one of the most striking and one of the most interesting portions of
modern literature.
CHAPTER XXVII.
HISTORICAL NARRATIVE POEMS.--SEMPERE.--ÇAPATA.--AYLLON.--SANZ.--
FERNANDEZ.--ESPINOSA.--COLOMA.--ERCILLA AND HIS ARAUCANA, WITH OSORIO’S
CONTINUATION.--OÑA.--GABRIEL LASSO DE LA VEGA.--SAAVEDRA.--CASTELLANOS.--
CENTENERA.--VILLAGRA.--RELIGIOUS NARRATIVE POEMS.--BLASCO.--MATA.--VIRUES
AND HIS MONSERRATE.--BRAVO.--VALDIVIELSO.--HOJEDA.--DIAZ AND OTHERS.--
IMAGINATIVE NARRATIVE POEMS.--ESPINOSA AND OTHERS.--BARAHONA DE SOTO.--
BALBUENA AND HIS BERNARDO.
Epic poetry, from its general dignity and pretensions, is almost
uniformly placed at the head of the different divisions of a
nation’s literature. But in Spain, though the series of efforts in
that direction begins early and boldly, and has been continued with
diligence down to our own times, little has been achieved that is
worthy of memory. The Poem of the Cid is, indeed, the oldest attempt at
narrative poetry in the languages of modern Europe that deserves the
name; and, composed, as it must have been, above a century before the
appearance of Dante and two centuries before the time of Chaucer, it
is to be regarded as one of the most remarkable outbreaks of poetical
and national enthusiasm on record. But the few similar attempts that
were made at long intervals in the periods immediately subsequent,
like those we witness in “The Chronicle of Fernan Gonzalez,” in “The
Life of Alexander,” and in “The Labyrinth” of Juan de Mena, deserve to
be mentioned chiefly in order to mark the progress of Spanish culture
during the lapse of three centuries. No one of them showed the power of
the old half-epic Poem of the Cid.
At last, when we reach the reign of Charles the Fifth, or rather, when
we come to the immediate results of that reign, it seems as if the
national genius had been inspired with a poetical ambition no less
extravagant than the ambition for military glory which their foreign
successes had stirred up in the masters of the state. The poets of the
time, or those who regarded themselves as such, evidently imagined that
to them was assigned the task of worthily celebrating the achievements,
in the Old World and in the New, which had really raised their country
to the first place among the powers of Europe, and which it was then
thought not presumptuous to hope would lay the foundation for a
universal monarchy.
In the reign of Philip the Second, therefore, we have an extraordinary
number of epic and narrative poems,--in all above twenty,--full of
the feelings which then animated the nation, and devoted to subjects
connected with Spanish glory, both ancient and recent,--poems in
which their authors endeavoured to imitate the great Italian epics,
already at the height of their reputation, and fondly believed they
had succeeded. But the works they thus produced, with hardly more than
a single exception, belong rather to patriotism than to poetry; the
best of them being so closely confined to matters of fact, that they
come with nearly equal pretensions into the province of history, while
the rest fall into a dull, chronicling style, which makes it of little
consequence under what class they may chance to be arranged.
The first of these historical epics is the “Carolea” of Hierónimo
Sempere, published in 1560, and devoted to the victories and glories
of Charles the Fifth, whose name, in fact, it bears. The author was
a merchant,--a circumstance strange in Spanish literature,--and
it is written in the Italian _ottava rima_; the first part, which
consists of eleven cantos, being devoted to the first wars in Italy,
and ending with the captivity of Francis the First; while the second,
which consists of nineteen more, contains the contest in Germany, the
Emperor’s visit to Flanders, and his coronation at Bologna. The whole
fills two volumes, and ends abruptly with the promise of another,
devoted to the capture of Tunis; a promise which, happily, was never
redeemed.[790]
[790] “La Carolea,” Valencia, 1560, 2 tom. 12mo. The first volume
ends with accounts of the author’s birthplace, in the course
of which he commemorates some of its merchants and some of its
scholars, particularly Luis Vives. Notices of Sempere are to be
found in Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 135, in Fuster, Tom. I. p. 110, and
in the notes to Polo’s “Diana,” by Cerdá, p. 380.
A poem entitled “Conquista de la Nueva Castilla,” first published
at Paris in 1848, 12mo, by J. A. Sprecher de Bernegg, _may_,
perhaps, be older than the “Carolea.” It is a short narrative
poem, in two hundred and eighty-three octave stanzas, apparently
written about the middle of the sixteenth century, by some
unknown author of that period, and devoted to the glory of
Francisco Pizarro, from the time when he left Panamá, in 1524, to
the fall of Atabalipa. It was found in the Imperial Library at
Vienna, among the manuscripts there, but, from a review of it in
the Jahrbücher der Literatur, Band CXXI., 1848, it seems to have
been edited with very little critical care. It does not, however,
deserve more than it received. It is wholly worthless;--not
better than we can easily suppose to have been written by one of
Pizarro’s rude followers.
The next narrative poem in the order of time was published by Luis
de Çapata, only five years later. It is the “Carlo Famoso,” devoted,
like the last, to the fame of Charles the Fifth, and, like that, more
praised than it deserves to be by Cervantes, when he places both
of them among the best poetry in Don Quixote’s library. Its author
declares that he was thirteen years in writing it; and it fills fifty
cantos, comprehending above forty thousand lines in octave stanzas. But
never was poem avowedly written in a spirit so prosaic. It gives year
by year the life of the Emperor, from 1522 to his death at San Yuste in
1558; and, to prevent the possibility of mistake, the date is placed
at the top of each page, and every thing of an imaginative nature or
of doubtful authority is distinguished by asterisks from the chronicle
of ascertained facts. Two passages in it are interesting, one of which
gives the circumstances of the death of Garcilasso, and the other an
ample account of Torralva, the great magician of the time of Ferdinand
and Isabella;--the same person who is commemorated by Don Quixote when
he rides among the stars. Such, however, as the poem is, Çapata had
great confidence in its merits, and boastfully published it at his own
expense. But it was unsuccessful, and he died regretting his folly.[791]
[791] “Carlo Famoso de Don Luis de Çapata,” Valencia, 1565, 4to.
At the opening of the fiftieth canto, he congratulates himself
that he has “reached the end of his thirteen years’ journey”;
but, after all, is obliged to hurry over the last fourteen years
of his hero’s life in that one canto. For Garcilasso, see Canto
XLI.; and for Torralva’s story, which strongly illustrates the
Spanish character of the sixteenth century, see Cantos XXVIII.,
XXX., XXXI., and XXXII., with the notes of the commentators to
Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 41.
Diego Ximenez de Ayllon, of Arcos de la Frontera, who served as a
soldier under the Duke of Alva, wrote a poem on the history of the
Cid, and of some other of the early Spanish heroes, and dedicated it,
in 1579, to his great leader. But this, too, was little regarded at
the time, and is now hardly remembered.[792] Nor was more favor shown
to Hippólito Sanz, a knight of the Order of Saint John, in Malta, who
shared in the brave defence of that island against the Turks in 1565,
and wrote a poetical history of that defence, under the name of “La
Maltea,” which was published in 1582.[793]
[792] Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 323) gives the date and
title, and little else. The only copy of the poem known to me
is one printed at Alcalá de Henares, 1579, 4to, 149 leaves,
double columns. It is dedicated to the great Duke of Alva, under
whom its author had served, and consists chiefly of the usual
traditions about the Cid, told in rather flowing, but insipid,
octave stanzas.
In the Library of the Society of History at Madrid, MS. D. No.
42, is a poem in double _redondillas de arte mayor_, by Fray
Gonzalo de Arredondo, on the achievements both of the Cid and
of the Count Fernan Gonzalez, the merits of each being nicely
balanced in alternate cantos. It is hardly worth notice, except
from the circumstance that it was written as early as 1522, when
the unused license of Charles V. to print it was given. Fray
Arredondo is also the author of “El Castillo Inexpugnable y
Defensorio de la Fé,” Burgos, 1528, fol.
[793] Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 179, and Velazquez, Dieze, p. 385.
Other poems were produced during the same period, not unlike those
we have just noticed;--such as the “Historia Parthenopea” of Alfonso
Fernandez, whose hero is Gonzalvo de Córdova; Espinosa’s continuation
of the “Orlando Furioso,” which is not entirely without merit; “The
Decade on the Passion of Christ,” by Coloma, which is grave and
dignified, if nothing else;--all in the manner of the contemporary
Italian heroic and narrative poems. But no one of them obtained much
regard when it first appeared, and none of them can now be said to be
remembered. Indeed, there is but one long poem of the age of Philip
the Second which obtained an acknowledged reputation from the first,
and has preserved it ever since, both at home and abroad;--I mean the
“Araucana.”[794]
[794] The “Historia Parthenopea,” in eight books, by Alfonso
Fernandez, was printed at Rome in 1516, says Antonio (Bib. Nov.,
Tom. I. p. 23). Nicolas de Espinosa’s second part of the “Orlando
Furioso” is better known, as there are editions of it in 1555,
1556, 1557, and 1559, the one of 1556 being printed at Antwerp
in 4to. Juan de Coloma’s “Década de la Pasion,” in ten books,
_terza rima_, was printed in 1579, in 8vo, at Caller (Cagliari)
in Sardinia, where its author was viceroy, and on which island
this has been said to be the first book ever printed. There is
an edition of it, also, of 1586. (Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 175.) It is
praised by Cervantes in his “Galatea,” and is a sort of harmony
of the Gospels, not without a dignified movement in its action,
and interspersed with narratives from the Old Testament. The
story of St. Veronica, (Lib. VII.), and the description of the
Madonna as she sees her son surrounded by the rude crowd and
ascending Mount Calvary under the burden of his cross, (Lib.
VIII.), are passages of considerable merit. Coloma says he chose
the _terza rima_ “because it is the gravest verse in the language
and the best suited to any grave subject.” In a poem in the same
volume, on the Resurrection, he has, however, taken the octave
rhyme; and half a century earlier, the _terza rima_ had been
rejected by Pedro Fernandez de Villegas, as quite unfitted for
Castilian poetry. See _ante_, Vol. I. p. 486, note.
Its author, whose personal character is impressed on every part of
his poem, was Alonso de Ercilla, third son of a gentleman of Biscayan
origin,--a proud circumstance, to which the poet himself alludes
more than once.[795] He was born in 1533, at Madrid, and his father,
a member of the council of Charles the Fifth, was able, from his
influence at court, to have his son educated as one of the pages of the
prince who was afterwards Philip the Second, and whom the young Ercilla
accompanied in his journeys to different parts of Europe between 1547
and 1551. In 1554, he was with Philip in England, when that prince
married Queen Mary; and news having arrived there, as he tells us in
his poem, of an outbreak of the natives in Chili which threatened to
give trouble to their conquerors, many noble Spaniards then at the
English court volunteered, in the old spirit of their country, to serve
against the infidels.
[795] In Canto XXVII. he says: “Behold the rough soil of ancient
Biscay, whence it is certain comes that nobility now extended
through the whole land; behold Bermeo, the head of Biscay,
surrounded with thorn-woods, and above its port the old walls of
the house of Ercilla, a house older than the city itself.”
Among those who presented themselves to join in this romantic
expedition was Ercilla, then twenty-one years old. By permission of
the prince, he says, he exchanged his civil for military service, and
for the first time girded on his sword in earnest. But the beginning
of the expedition was not auspicious. Aldrete, a person of military
experience, who was in the suite of Philip, and under whose standard
they had embarked in the enterprise, died on the way; and after their
arrival, Ercilla and his friends were sent, under the less competent
leading of a son of the viceroy of Peru, to achieve the subjugation
of the territory of Arauco,--an inconsiderable spot of earth, but
one which had been so bravely defended by its inhabitants against
the Spaniards as to excite respect for their heroism in many parts
of Europe.[796] The contest was a bloody one; for the Araucans were
desperate and the Spaniards cruel. Ercilla went through his part of it
with honor, meeting the enemy in seven severe battles, and suffering
still more severely from wanderings in the wilderness, and from long
exposure to the harassing warfare of savages.
[796] “Arauco,” says Ercilla, “is a small province, about twenty
leagues long and twelve broad, which produces the most warlike
people in the Indies, and is therefore called The Unconquered
State.” Its people are still proud of their name.
Once he was in greater danger from his countrymen and from his own
fiery temper than he was, perhaps, at any moment from the common enemy.
In an interval of the war, when a public tournament was held in honor
of the accession of Philip the Second to the throne, some cause of
offence occurred during the jousting between Ercilla and another of the
cavaliers. The mimic fight, as had not unfrequently happened on similar
occasions in the mother country, was changed into a real one; and, in
the confusion that followed, the young commander, who presided at the
festival, rashly ordered both the principal offenders to be put to
death,--a sentence which he reluctantly changed into imprisonment and
exile, though not until after Ercilla had been actually placed on the
scaffold for execution.
When he was released he seems to have engaged in the romantic
enterprise of hunting down the cruel and savage adventurer, Lope de
Aguirre, but he did not arrive in the monster’s neighbourhood till the
moment when his career of blood was ended. From this time we know only,
that, after suffering from a long illness, Ercilla returned to Spain in
1562, at the age of twenty-nine, having been eight years in America. At
first, his unsettled habits made him restless, and he visited Italy and
other parts of Europe; but in 1570 he married a lady connected with
the great family of Santa Cruz, Doña María de Bazan, whom he celebrates
at the end of the eighteenth canto of his poem. About 1576, he was
made gentleman of the bed-chamber to the Emperor of Germany,--perhaps
a merely titular office; and about 1580, he was again in Madrid and in
poverty, complaining loudly of the neglect and ingratitude of the king
whom he had so long served, and who seemed now to have forgotten him.
During the latter part of his life, however, we almost entirely lose
sight of him, and know only that he began a poem in honor of the family
of Santa Cruz, and that he died as early as 1595.
Ercilla is to be counted among the many instances in which Spanish
poetical genius and heroism were one feeling. He wrote in the spirit
in which he fought; and his principal work is as military as any
portion of his adventurous life. Its subject is the very expedition
against Arauco which occupied eight or nine years of his youth; and
he has simply called it “La Araucana,” making it a long heroic poem
in thirty-seven cantos, which, with the exception of two or three
trifles of no value, is all that remains of his works. Fortunately,
it has proved a sufficient foundation for his fame. But though it is
unquestionably a poem that discovers much of the sensibility of genius,
it has great defects; for it was written when the elements of epic
poetry were singularly misunderstood in Spain, and Ercilla, misled
by such models as the “Carolea” and “Carlo Famoso,” fell easily into
serious mistakes.
The first division of the Araucana is, in fact, a versified history
of the early part of the war. It is geographically and statistically
accurate. It is a poem, thus far, that should be read with a map, and
one whose connecting principle is merely the succession of events.
Of this rigid accuracy he more than once boasts; and, to observe it,
he begins with a description of Arauco and its people, amidst whom he
lays his scene, and then goes on through fifteen cantos of consecutive
battles, negotiations, conspiracies, and adventures, just as they
occurred. He composed this part of his poem, he tells us, in the
wilderness, where he fought and suffered; taking the night to describe
what the day had brought to pass, and writing his verses on fragments
of paper, or, when these failed, on scraps of skins; so that it is,
in truth, a poetical journal, in octave rhymes, of the expedition in
which he was engaged. These fifteen cantos, written between 1555 and
1563, constitute the first part, which ends abruptly in the midst of a
violent tempest, and which was printed by itself in 1569.
Ercilla intimates that he soon discovered such a description of
successive events to be monotonous; and he determined to intersperse
it with incidents more interesting and poetical. In his second part,
therefore, which was not printed till 1578, we have, it is true, the
same historical fidelity in the main thread of the narrative, but it is
broken with something like epic machinery; such as a vision of Bellona,
in the seventeenth and eighteenth cantos, where the poet witnesses
in South America the victory of Philip the Second at Saint Quentin,
the day it was won in France;--the cave of the magician Fiton, in the
twenty-third and twenty-fourth cantos, where he sees the battle of
Lepanto, which happened long afterwards, fought by anticipation;--the
romantic story of Tegualda in the twentieth, and that of Glaura in
the twenty-fourth: so that, when we come to the end of the second
part,--which concludes, again, with needless abruptness, we find that
we have enjoyed more poetry than we had in the first, if we have made
less rapid progress in the history.
In the third part, which appeared in 1590, we have again a continuation
of the events of the war, though with episodes such as that in the
thirty-second and thirty-third cantos,--which the poet strangely
devotes to a defence, after the manner of the old Spanish chronicles,
of the character of Queen Dido from the imputations cast on it by
Virgil,--and that in the thirty-sixth, in which he pleasantly gives us
much of what little we know concerning his own personal history.[797]
In the thirty-seventh and last, he leaves all his previous subjects,
and discusses the right of public and private war, and the claims of
Philip the Second to the crown of Portugal; ending the whole poem,
as far as he himself ended it, with touching complaints of his own
miserable condition and disappointed hopes, and his determination to
give the rest of his life to penitence and devotion.
[797] The accounts of himself are chiefly in Cantos XIII.,
XXXVI., and XXXVII.; and besides the facts I have given in the
text, I find it stated (Seman. Pintoresco, 1842, p. 195) that
Ercilla in 1571 received the Order of Santiago, and in 1578 was
employed by Philip II. on an inconsiderable mission to Saragossa.
This can hardly be called an epic. It is an historical poem, partly
in the manner of Silius Italicus, yet seeking to imitate the sudden
transitions and easy style of the Italian masters, and struggling
awkwardly to incorporate with different parts of its structure some
of the supernatural machinery of Homer and Virgil. But this is the
unfortunate side of the work. In other respects Ercilla is more
successful. His descriptive powers, except in relation to natural
scenery, are remarkable, and, whether devoted to battles or to the
wild manners of the unfortunate Indians, have not been exceeded by
any other Spanish poet. His speeches, too, are often excellent,
especially the remarkable one in the second canto, given to Colócolo,
the eldest of the Caciques, where the poet has been willing to place
himself in direct rivalship with the speech which Homer, under
similar circumstances, has given to Ulysses in the first book of the
Iliad.[798] And his characters, so far as the Araucan chiefs are
concerned, are drawn with force and distinctness, and lead us to
sympathize with the cause of the Indians rather than with that of the
invading Spaniards. Besides all this, his genius and sensibility often
break through, where we should least expect it, and his Castilian
feelings and character still oftener; the whole poem being pervaded
with that deep sense of loyalty which was always a chief ingredient in
Spanish honor and heroism, and which, in Ercilla, seems never to have
been chilled by the ingratitude of the master to whom he devoted his
life, and to whose glory he consecrated this poem.[799]
[798] The great praise of this speech by Voltaire, in the Essay
prefixed to his “Henriade,” 1726, first made the Araucana known
beyond the Pyrenees; and if Voltaire had read the poem he
pretended to criticize, he might have done something in earnest
for its fame. (See his Works, ed. Beaumarchais, Paris, 1785, 8vo,
Tom. X. pp. 394-401.) But his mistakes are so gross as to impair
the value of his admiration.
[799] The best edition of the Araucana is that of Sancha, Madrid,
1776, 2 tom. 12mo; and the most exact life of its author is in
Baena, Tom. I. p. 32. Hayley published an abstract of the poem,
with bad translations of some of its best passages, in the
notes to his third epistle on Epic Poetry (London, 1782, 4to);
but there is a better and more ample examination of it in the
“Caraktere der vornehmsten Dichter aller Nationen,” Leipzig,
1793, 8vo, Band II. Theil I. pp. 140 and 349.
The Araucana, though one third longer than the Iliad, is a fragment;
but, as far as the war of Arauco is concerned, it was soon completed
by the addition of two more parts, embracing thirty-three additional
cantos,--the work of a poet by the name of Osorio, who published it in
1597. Of its author, a native of Leon, we know only that he describes
himself to have been young when he wrote it, and that in 1598 he gave
the world another poem, on the wars of the knights of Malta and the
capture of Rhodes. His continuation of the Araucana was several times
printed, but has long since ceased to be read. Its more interesting
portions are those in which the poet relates, with apparent accuracy,
many of the exploits of Ercilla among the Indians;--the more absurd are
those in which, under the pretext of visions of Bellona, an account
is given of the conquest of Oran by Cardinal Ximenes, and that of
Peru by the Pizarros, neither of which has any thing to do with the
main subject of the poem. Taken as a whole, it is nearly as dull and
chronicling as any thing of its class that preceded it.[800]
[800] The last edition of the continuation of the Araucana, by
Diego de Sanisteban Osorio, of which I have any knowledge, was
printed with the poem of Ercilla at Madrid, 1733, folio.
But there is one difficulty about both parts of this poem, which
must have been very obvious at the time. Neither shows any purpose
of doing honor to the commander in the war of Arauco, who was yet a
representative of the great Mendoza family, and a leading personage
at the courts of Philip the Second and Philip the Third. Why Osorio
should have passed him over so slightly is not apparent; but Ercilla
was evidently offended by the punishment inflicted on him after
the unfortunate tournament, and took this mode of expressing his
displeasure.[801] A poet of Chili, therefore, Pedro de Oña, attempted,
so far as Ercilla was concerned, to repair the wrong, and, in 1596,
published his “Arauco Subjugated,” in nineteen cantos, which he devoted
expressly to the honor of the neglected commander. Oña’s success was
inconsiderable, but was quite as much as he deserved. His poem was once
reprinted; but, though it contains sixteen thousand lines, it stops in
the middle of the events it undertakes to record, and has never been
finished. It contains consultations of the infernal powers, like those
in Tasso, and a love-story, in imitation of the one in Ercilla; but it
is mainly historical, and ends at last with an account of the capture
of “that English pirate Richerte Aquines,”--no doubt Sir Richard
Hawkins, who was taken in the Pacific in 1594, under circumstances
not more unlike those which Oña describes than might be expected in a
poetical version of them by a Spaniard.[802]
[801] The injustice, as it was deemed by many courtly persons,
of Ercilla to Garcia de Mendoza, fourth Marquis of Cañete, who
commanded the Spaniards in the war of Arauco, may have been one
of the reasons why the poet was neglected by his own government
after his return to Spain, and was certainly a subject of remark
in the reigns of Philip III. and IV. In 1613, Christóval Suarez
de Figueroa, the well-known poet, published a life of the
Marquis, and dedicated it to the profligate Duke de Lerma, then
the reigning favorite. It is written with some elegance and some
affectation in its style, but is full of flattery to the great
family of which the Marquis was a member; and when its author
reaches the point of time at which Ercilla was involved in the
trouble at the tournament, already noticed, he says: “There
arose a difference between Don Juan de Pineda and Don Alonso
de Ercilla, which went so far, that they drew their swords.
Instantly a vast number of weapons sprang from the scabbards of
those on foot, who, without knowing what to do, rushed together
and made a scene of great confusion. A rumor was spread, that it
had been done in order to cause a revolt; and from some slight
circumstances it was believed that the two pretended combatants
had arranged it all beforehand. They were seized by command
of the general, who ordered them to be beheaded, intending to
infuse terror into the rest, and knowing that severity is the
most effectual way of insuring military obedience. The tumult,
however, was appeased; and as it was found, on inquiry, that
the whole affair was accidental, the sentence was revoked. The
becoming rigor with which Don Alonso was treated caused the
silence in which he endeavoured to bury the achievements of
Don Garcia. He wrote the wars of Arauco, carrying them on by a
body without a head;--that is, by an army, with no intimation
that it had a general. Ungrateful for the many favors he had
received from the same hand, he left his rude sketch without
the living colors that belonged to it; as if it were possible
to hide the valor, virtue, forecast, authority, and success of
a nobleman whose words and deeds always went together and were
alike admirable. But so far could passion prevail, that the
account thus given remained in the minds of many as if it were
an apocryphal one; whereas, had it been dutifully written, its
truth would have stood authenticated to all. For, by the consent
of all, the personage of whom the poet ought to have written was
without fault, gentle, and of great humanity; and he who was
silent in his praise strove in vain to dim his glory.” Hechos de
Don Garcia de Mendoza, por Chr. Suarez de Figueroa, Madrid, 1613,
4to, p. 103.
The theatre seemed especially anxious to make up for the
deficiencies of the greatest narrative poet of the country. In
1622, a play appeared, entitled “Algunas Hazañas de las muchas
de Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza”; a poor attempt at flattery,
which, on its title-page, professes to be the work of Luis de
Belmonte, but, in a sort of table of contents, is ascribed
chiefly to eight other poets, among whom are Antonio Mira de
Mescua, Luis Vélez de Guevara, and Guillen de Castro. Of the
“Arauco Domado” of Lope de Vega, printed in 1629, and the humble
place assigned in it to Ercilla, I have spoken, _ante_, p. 207.
To these should be added two others, namely, the “Governador
Prudente” of Gaspar de Avila, in Tom. XXI. of the Comedias
Escogidas, printed in 1664, in which Don Garcia arrives first
on the scene of action in Chili, and distinguishes his command
by acts of wisdom and clemency; and in Tom. XXII., 1665, the
“Españoles en Chili,” by Francisco Gonzalez de Bustos, devoted
in part to the glory of Don Garcia’s father, and ending with
the impalement of Caupolican and the baptism of another of the
principal Indians; each as characteristic of the age as was the
homage of all to the Mendozas.
[802] “Arauco Domado, compuesto por el Licenciado Pedro de Oña,
Natural de los Infantes de Engol en Chile, etc., impreso en la
Ciudad de los Reyes,” (Lima), 1596, 12mo, and Madrid, 1605.
Besides which, Oña wrote a poem on the earthquake at Lima in
1599. Antonio is wrong in suggesting that Oña was not a native of
America.
But as the marvellous discoveries of the conquerors of America
continued to fill the world with their fame, and to claim at home no
small part of the interest that had so long been given to the national
achievements in the Moorish wars, it was natural that the greatest of
all the adventurers, Hernando Cortés, should come in for his share of
the poetical honors that were lavishly scattered on all sides. In fact,
as early as 1588, Gabriel Lasso de la Vega, a young cavalier of Madrid,
stirred up by the example of Ercilla, published a poem, entitled “The
Valiant Cortés,” which six years later he enlarged and printed anew
under the name of “La Mexicana”; and in 1599, Antonio de Saavedra, a
native of Mexico, published his “Indian Pilgrim,” which contains a
regular life of Cortés in above sixteen thousand lines, written, as the
author assures us, on the ocean, and in seventy days. Both are mere
chronicling histories; but the last is not without freshness and truth,
from the circumstance that it was the work of one familiar with the
scenes he describes, and with the manners of the unhappy race of men
whose disastrous fate he records.[803]
[803] “Cortés Valeroso, por Gabriel Lasso de la Vega,” Madrid,
1588, 4to, and “La Mexicana,” Madrid, 1594, 8vo. Tragedies and
other works, which I have not seen, are also attributed to him.
(Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II. p. 264.) “El Peregrino Indiano, por
Don Antonio de Saavedra Guzman, Viznieto del Conde del Castellar,
nacido en Mexico,” Madrid, 1599, 12mo. It is in twenty cantos of
octave stanzas; and though we know nothing else of its author, we
know, by the laudatory verses prefixed to his poem, that Lope de
Vega and Vicente Espinel were among his friends. It brings the
story of Cortés down to the death of Guatimozin.
In the same year with the “Valiant Cortés” appeared the first volume of
the lives of some of the early discoverers and adventurers in America,
by Juan de Castellanos, an ecclesiastic of Tunja in the kingdom of New
Granada; but one who, like many others that entered the Church in their
old age, had been a soldier in his youth, and had visited many of the
countries, and shared in many of the battles, he describes. It begins
with an account of Columbus, and ends, about 1560, with the expedition
of Orsua and the crimes of Aguirre, which Humboldt has called the most
dramatic episode in the history of the Spanish conquests, and of which
Southey has made an interesting, though painful, story. Why no more
of the poem of Castellanos was published does not appear. More was
known to exist; and at last, the second and third parts were found,
and, with the testimony of Ercilla to the truth of their narratives,
were published in 1847, bringing their broken accounts of the Spanish
conquests in America, and especially in that part of it since known
as Colombia, down to about 1588. The whole, except the conclusion, is
written in the Italian octave stanza, and extends to nearly ninety
thousand lines, in pure, fluent Castilian, which soon afterwards became
rare, but in a chronicling spirit, which, though it adds to its value
as history, takes from it all the best characteristics of poetry.[804]
[804] The poem of Castellanos is singularly enough entitled
“_Elegias_ de Varones Ilustres de Indias,” and we have some
reason to suppose it originally consisted of four parts.
(Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 674.) The first was printed
at Madrid, 1589, 4to; but the second and third, discovered, I
believe, in the National Library of that city, were not published
till they appeared in the fourth volume of the Biblioteca of
Aribau, Madrid, 1847, 8vo. _Elegias_ seems to have been used
by Castellanos in the sense of _eulogies_. Of their author the
little we know is told by himself.
Other poems of the same general character followed. One on the
discovery and settlement of La Plata is by Centenera, who shared in the
trials and sufferings of the original conquest,--a long, dull poem, in
twenty-eight cantos, full of credulity, and yet not without value as a
record of what its author saw and learned in his wild adventures. It
contains, in the earlier parts, much irrelevant matter concerning Peru,
and is throughout a strange mixture of history and geography, ending
with three cantos devoted to “Captain Thomas Candis, captain-general
of the queen of England,”--in other words, Thomas Cavendish, half
gentleman, half pirate, whose overthrow in Brazil, in 1592, Centenera
thinks a sufficiently glorious catastrophe for his long poem.[805]
Another similar work on an expedition into New Mexico was written by
Gaspar de Villagra, a captain of infantry, who served in the adventures
he describes, and published his account in 1610, after his return to
Spain. But both belong to the domain of history rather than to that of
poetry.[806]
[805] “Argentina, Conquista del Rio de la Plata y Tucuman, y
otros Sucesos del Peru,” Lisboa, 1602, 4to. There is a love-story
in Canto XII., and some talk about enchantments elsewhere; but,
with a few such slight exceptions, the poem is evidently pretty
good geography, and the best history the author could collect on
the spot. I know it only in the reprint of Barcia, who takes it
into his collection entirely for its historical claims.
One thing has much struck me in this and all the poems written
by Spaniards on their conquests in America, and especially by
those who visited the countries they celebrate. It is, that
there are no proper sketches of the peculiar scenery through
which they passed, though much of it is among the most beautiful
and grand that exists on the globe, and must have been filling
them constantly with new wonder. The truth is, that, when they
describe woods and rivers and mountains, their descriptions
would as well fit the Pyrenees or the Guadalquivir as they do
Mexico, the Andes, or the Amazon. Perhaps this deficiency is
connected with the same causes that have prevented Spain from
ever producing a great landscape painter.
[806] “La Conquista del Nuevo Mexico, por Gaspar de Villagra,”
was printed at Alcalá in 1610, 8vo. Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I.
p. 535.
No less characteristic of the national temper and genius than these
historical and heroic poems were the long religious narratives in verse
produced during the same period and later. To one of these--that of
Coloma on “The Passion of Christ,” printed in 1576--we have already
alluded. Another, “The Universal Redemption,” by Blasco, first printed
in 1584, should also be mentioned. It fills fifty-six cantos, and
contains nearly thirty thousand lines, embracing the history of man
from the creation to the descent of the Holy Spirit, and reading
in many parts like one of the old Mysteries.[807] A third poem,
by Mata, not unlike the last, extends through two volumes, and is
devoted to the glories of Saint Francis and five of his followers; a
collection of legends in octave stanzas, put together without order
or picturesqueness, the first of which sets forth the meek Saint
Francis in the disguise of a knight-errant. None of the three has any
value.[808]
[807] “Universal Redencion de Francisco Hernandez Blasco,”
Toledo, 1584, 1589, 4to, Madrid, 1609, 4to. He was of Toledo, and
claims that a part of his poem was a revelation to a nun.
[808] “El Cavallero Assisio, Vida de San Francisco y otros
Cinco Santos, por Gabriel de Mata,” Tom. I., Bilbao, 1587, with
a wood-cut of St. Francis on the title-page, as a knight on
horseback and in full armour; Tom. II., 1589, 4to. A third volume
was promised, but it never appeared. The five saints are St.
Anthony of Padua, St. Buenaventura, St. Luis the Bishop, Sta.
Bernadina, and Sta. Clara, all Minorites. St. Anthony preaching
to the fishes, whom he addresses (Canto XVII.) as _hermanos
peces_, is very quaint.
The next in the list, as we descend, is one of the best of its class,
if not the very best. It is the “Monserrate” of Virues, the dramatic
and lyric poet, so much praised by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. The
subject is taken from the legends of the Spanish Church in the ninth
century. Garin, a hermit living on the desolate mountain of Monserrate,
in Catalonia, is guilty of one of the grossest and most atrocious
crimes of which human nature is capable. Remorse seizes him. He goes
to Rome for absolution, and obtains it only on the most degrading
conditions. His penitence, however, is sincere and complete. In proof
of it, the person he has murdered is restored to life, and the Madonna,
appearing on the wild mountain where the unhappy man had committed his
crime, consecrates its deep solitudes by founding there the magnificent
sanctuary which has ever since made the Monserrate holy ground to all
devout Spaniards.
That such a legend should be taken by a soldier and a man of the
world as the subject of an epic would hardly have been possible in
the sixteenth century in any country except Spain. But many a soldier
there, even in our own times, has ended a life of excesses in a
hermitage as rude and solitary as that of Garin;[809] and in the time
of Philip the Second, it seemed nothing marvellous that one who had
fought at the battle of Lepanto, and who, by way of distinction, was
commonly called “the Captain Virues,” should yet devote the leisure
of his best years to a poem on Garin’s deplorable life and revolting
adventures. Such, at least, was the fact. The “Monserrate,” from the
moment of its appearance, was successful. Nor has its success been
materially diminished at any period since. It has more of the proper
arrangement and proportions of an epic than any other of the serious
poems of its class in the language; and in the richness and finish of
its versification, it is not surpassed, if it is equalled, by any of
those of its age. The difficulties Virues had to encounter lay in the
nature of his subject and the low character of his hero; but in the
course of twenty cantos, interspersed with occasional episodes, like
those on the battle of Lepanto and the glories of Monserrate, these
disadvantages are not always felt as blemishes, and, as we know, have
not prevented the “Monserrate” from being read and admired in an age
little inclined to believe the legend on which it is founded.[810]
[809] In a hermitage on a mountain near Córdova, where about
thirty hermits lived in stern silence and subjected to the
most cruel penances, I once saw a person who had served with
distinction as an officer at the battle of Trafalgar, and another
who had been of the household of the first queen of Ferdinand
VII. The Duke de Rivas and his brother, Don Angel,--now wearing
the title himself, but more distinguished as a poet, or for
his eminent merits in the diplomatic and military service of
his country, than for his high rank,--who led me up that rude
mountain, and filled a long and beautiful morning with strange
sights and adventures and stories, such as can be found in no
other country but Spain, assured me that cases like those of
the Spanish officers who had become hermits were still of no
infrequent occurrence in their country. This was in 1818.
[810] Of Virues a notice has been already given, (_ante_, p.
28), to which it is only necessary to add here that there are
editions of the Monserrate of 1588, 1601, 1602, 1609, and 1805;
the last (Madrid, 8vo) with a Preface written, I think, by Mayans
y Siscar. A poem by Francisco de Ortega, on the same subject,
appeared about the middle of the eighteenth century, in small
quarto, without date, entitled “Orígen, Antiguedad é Invencion de
nuestra Señora de Monserrate.” It is entirely worthless.
The “Benedictina,” by Nicholas Bravo, was published in 1604, and
seems to have been intended to give the lives of Saint Benedict and
his principal followers, in the way in which Castellanos had given
the lives of Columbus and the early American adventurers, but was
probably regarded rather as a book of devotion for the monks of the
brotherhood, in which the author held a high place, than as a book of
poetry. Certainly, to the worldly that is its true character. Nor can
any other than a similar merit be assigned to two poems for which the
social position of their author, Valdivielso, insured a wider temporary
reputation. The first is on the history of Joseph, the husband of
Mary, written, apparently, because Valdivielso himself had received
in baptism the name of that saint. The other is on the peculiarly
sacred image of the Madonna, preserved by a series of miracles from
contamination during the subjugation of Spain by the Moors, and
ever since venerated in the cathedral of Toledo, to whose princely
archbishop Valdivielso was attached as a chaplain. Both of these poems
are full of learning and of dulness, enormously long, and comprehend
together a large part of the history, not only of the Spanish Church,
but of the kingdom of Spain.[811]
[811] “La Benedictina de F. Nicolas Bravo,” Salamanca, 1604, 4to.
Bravo was a professor at Salamanca and Madrid, and died in 1648,
the head of a rich monastery of his order in Navarre. (Antonio,
Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 151.) Of Valdivielso I have spoken,
_ante_, p. 316. His “Vida, etc., de San Josef,” printed 1607 and
1647, makes above seven hundred pages in the edition of Lisbon,
1615, 12mo; and his “Sagrario de Toledo,” Barcelona, 1618, 12mo,
fills nearly a thousand;--both in octave stanzas, as are nearly
all the poems of their class.
Lope’s religious epic and narrative poems, of which we have already
spoken, appeared at about the same time with those of Valdivielso, and
enjoyed the success that attended whatever bore the name of the great
popular author of his age. But better than any thing of this class
produced by him was the “Christiada” of Diego de Hojeda, printed in
1611, and taken in a slight degree from the Latin poem with the same
title by Vida, but not enough indebted to it to impair the author’s
claims to originality. Its subject is very simple. It opens with the
Last Supper, and it closes with the Crucifixion. The episodes are few
and appropriate, except one,--that in which the dress of the Saviour
in the garden is made an occasion for describing all human sins, whose
allegorical history is represented as if woven with curses into the
seven ample folds of the mantle laid on the shoulders of the expiatory
victim, who thus bears them for our sake. The vision of the future
glories of his Church granted to the sufferer is, on the contrary,
happily conceived and well suited to its place; and still better are
the gentle and touching consolations offered him in prophecy. Indeed,
not a little skill is shown, in the general epic structure of the
poem, and its verse is uncommonly sweet and graceful. If the characters
were drawn with a firmer hand, and if the language were always
sustained with the dignity its subject demands, the “Christiada” would
stand deservedly at the side of the “Monserrate” of Virues. Even after
making this deduction from its merits, no other religious poem in the
language is to be placed before it.[812]
[812] “La Christiada de Diego de Hojeda,” Sevilla, 1611, 4to. It
has the merit of having only twelve cantos, and, if this were the
proper place, it might well be compared with Milton’s “Paradise
Regained” for its scenes with the devils, and with Klopstock’s
“Messiah” for the scene of the crucifixion. Of the author we know
only that he was a native of Seville, but went young to Lima, in
Peru, where he wrote this poem, and where he died at the head of
a Dominican convent founded by himself. (Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom.
I. p. 289.) There is a _rifacimento_ of the “Christiada,” by Juan
Manuel de Berriozabal, printed Madrid, 1841, 18mo, in a small
volume; not, however, an improvement on the original.
In the same year, Alonso Diaz, of Seville, published a pious poem on
another of the consecrated images of the Madonna; and afterwards, in
rapid succession, we have heroic poems, as they are called, on Loyola,
and on the Madonna, both by Antonio de Escobar;--one on the creation
of the world, by Azevedo, but no more an epic than the “Week” of Du
Bartas, from which it is imitated;--and one on “The Brotherhood of the
Five Martyrs of Arabia,” by Rodriguez de Vargas; the last being the
result of a vow to two of their number, through whose intercession the
author believed himself to have been cured of a mortal disease. But all
these, and all of the same class that followed them,--the “David” of
Uziel,--Calvo’s poem on “The Virgin,”--Vivas’s “Life of Christ,”--Juan
Dávila’s “Passion of the Man-God,”--the “Samson” of Enriquez
Gomez,--another heroic poem on Loyola, by Camargo,--and another
“Christiad,” by Encisso,--which bring the list down to the end of the
century,--add nothing to the claims or character of Spanish religious
narrative poetry, though they add much to its cumbersome amount.[813]
[813] “Poema Castellano de nuestra Señora de Aguas Santas, por
Alonso Diaz,” Seville, 1611, cited by Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom.
I. p. 21).--“San Ignacio de Loyola, Poema Heróico,” Valladolid,
1613, 8vo, and “Historia de la Vírgen Madre de Dios,” 1608,
afterwards published with the title of “Nueva Jerusalen María,”
Valladolid, 1625, 18mo; both by Antonio de Escobar y Mendoza, and
both the work of his youth, since he lived to 1668. (Ibid., p.
115.) The last of these poems, my copy of which is of the fourth
edition, absurdly divides the life of the Madonna according to
the twelve precious stones that form the foundations of the New
Jerusalem in the twenty-first chapter of the Revelation; each
_fundamento_, as the separate portions or books are called, being
subdivided into three cantos; and the whole filling above twelve
thousand lines of octave stanzas, which are not always without
merit, though they generally have very little.--“Creacion del
Mundo de Alonso de Azevedo,” Roma, 1615. (Velazquez, Dieze, p.
395.)--“La Verdadera Hermandad de los Cinco Martires de Arabia,
por Damian Rodriguez de Vargas,” Toledo, 1621, 4to. It is very
short for the class to which it belongs, containing only about
three thousand lines, but it is hardly possible that any of them
should be worse.--“David, Poema Heróico del Doctor Jacobo Uziel,”
Venetia, 1624, pp. 440; a poem in twelve cantos, on the story of
the Hebrew monarch whose name it bears, written in a plain and
simple style, evidently imitating the flow of Tasso’s stanzas,
but without poetical spirit, and in the ninth canto absurdly
bringing a Spanish navigator to the court of Jerusalem.--“La
Mejor Muger Madre y Vírgen, Poema Sacro, por Sebastian de Nieva
Calvo,” Madrid, 1625, 4to. It ends in the fourteenth book with
the victory of Lepanto, which is attributed to the intercession
of the Madonna and the virtue of the rosary.--“Grandezas Divinas,
Vida y Muerte de nuestro Salvador, etc., por Fr. Duran Vivas,”
found in scattered papers after his death, and arranged and
modernized in its language by his grandson, who published it,
(Madrid, 1643, 4to); a worthless poem, more than half of which
is thrown into the form of a speech from Joseph to Pontius
Pilate.--“Pasion del Hombre Dios, por el Maestro Juan Dávila,”
Leon de Francia, 1661, folio, written in the Spanish _décimas_
of Espinel, and filling about three-and-twenty thousand lines,
divided into six books, which are subdivided into _estancias_,
or resting-places, and these again into cantos.--“Sanson
Nazareno, Poema Eróico, por Ant. Enriquez Gomez,” Ruan, 1656,
4to, thoroughly infected with Gongorism, as is another poem by
the same author, half narrative, half lyrical, called “La Culpa
del Primer Peregrino,” Ruan, 1644, 4to.--“San Ignacio de Loyola,
Poema Heróico, escrivialo Hernando Dominguez Camargo,” 1666, 4to,
a native of Santa Fé de Bogotá, whose poem, filling nearly four
hundred pages of octave rhymes, is a fragment published after his
death.--“La Christiada, Poema Sacro y Vida de Jesu Christo, que
escrivió Juan Francisco de Encisso y Monçon,” Cadiz, 1694, 4to;
deformed, like almost every thing of the period when it appeared,
with the worst taste.
* * * * *
Of an opposite character to these religious poems are the purely,
or almost purely, imaginative epics of the same period, whose form
yet brings them into the same class. Their number is not large, and
nearly all of them are connected more or less with the fictions which
Ariosto, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had thrown up
like brilliant fireworks into the Italian sky, and which had drawn to
them the admiration of all Europe, and especially of all Spain. There
a translation of the “Orlando Furioso,” poor, indeed, but popular,
had been published by Urrea as early as 1550. An imitation soon
followed,--the one already alluded to, as made by Espinosa in 1555.
It is called “The Second Part of the Orlando, with the True Event of
the Famous Battle of Roncesvalles, and the End and Death of the Twelve
Peers of France.” But at the very outset, its author tells us that “he
sings the great glory of Spaniards and the overthrow of Charlemagne
and his followers,” adding significantly, “This history will relate
the truth, and not give the story as it is told by that Frenchman,
Turpin.” Of course, we have, instead of the fictions to which we are
accustomed in Ariosto, the Spanish fictions of Bernardo del Carpio
and the rout of the Twelve Peers at Roncesvalles,--all very little to
the credit of Charlemagne, who, at the end, retreats, disgraced, to
Germany. But still, the whole is ingeniously connected with the stories
of the “Orlando Furioso,” and carries on, to a considerable extent, the
adventures of the personages who are its heroes and heroines.
Some of the fictions of Espinosa, however, are very extravagant and
absurd. Thus, in the twenty-second canto, Bernardo goes to Paris and
overthrows several of the paladins; and in the thirty-third, whose
scene is laid in Ireland, he disenchants Olympia and becomes king of
the island;--both of them needless and worthless innovations on the
story of Bernardo, as it comes to us in the old Spanish ballads and
chronicles. But in general, though it is certainly not wanting in
giants and enchantments, Espinosa’s continuation of the Orlando is
less encumbered with impossibilities and absurdities than the similar
poem of Lope de Vega; and, in some parts, is very easy and graceful in
its story-telling spirit. It ends with the thirty-fifth canto, after
going through above fourteen thousand lines in _ottava rima_; and yet,
after all, the conclusion is abrupt, and we have an intimation that
more may follow.[814]
[814] “Segunda Parte de Orlando, etc., por Nicolas Espinosa,”
Zaragoza, 1555, 4to, Anveres, 1656, 4to, etc. The Orlando of
Ariosto, translated by Urrea, was published at Lyons in 1550,
folio, (the same edition, no doubt, which Antonio gives to 1656),
and is treated with due severity by the curate in the scrutiny of
Don Quixote’s library, and by Clemencin in his commentary on that
passage. Tom. I. p. 120.
But no more came from the pen of Espinosa. Others, however, continued
the same series of fictions, if they did not take up the thread where
he left it. An Aragonese nobleman, Abarca de Bolea, wrote two different
poems,--“Orlando the Lover” and “Orlando the Bold”;--and Garrido de
Villena of Alcalá, who, in 1577, had made known to his countrymen
the “Orlando Innamorato” of Boiardo, in a Spanish dress, published,
six years afterwards, his “Battle of Roncesvalles”; a poem which was
followed, in 1585, by one of Augustin Alonso, on substantially the same
subject. But all of them are now neglected or forgotten.[815]
[815] “Orlando Enamorado de Don Martin Abarca de Bolea, Conde
de las Almunias, en Octava Rima,” Lerida, 1578;--“Orlando
Determinado, en Octava Rima,” Zaragoza, 1578. (Latassa, Bib.
Nov., Tom. II. p. 54.)--The “Orlando Enamorado” of Boiardo, by
Francisco Garrido de Villena, 1577, and the “Verdadero Suceso de
la Batalla de Roncesvalles,” by the same, 1683. (Antonio, Bib.
Nov., Tom. I. p. 428.)--“Historia de las Hazañas y Hechos del
Invencible Cavallero Bernardo del Carpio, por Agustin Alonso,”
Toledo, 1585. Pellicer (Don Quixote, Tom. I. p. 58, note) says he
had seen one copy of this book, and Clemencin says he never saw
any.--I have never met with either of those referred to in this
note.
Not so the “Angelica” of Luis Barahona de Soto, or, as it is commonly
called, “The Tears of Angelica.” The first twelve cantos were published
in 1586, and received by the men of letters of that age with an
extraordinary applause, which has continued to be echoed and reëchoed
down to our own times. Its author was a physician in an obscure village
near Seville, but he was known as a poet throughout Spain, and praised
alike by Diego de Mendoza, Silvestre, Herrera, Cetina, Mesa, Lope de
Vega, and Cervantes,--the last of whom makes the curate hasten to save
“The Tears of Angelica” from the flames, when Don Quixote’s library
was carried to the court-yard, crying out, “Truly, I should shed tears
myself, if such a book had been burnt; for its author was one of the
most famous poets, not only of Spain, but of the whole world.” All this
admiration, however, was extravagant; and in Cervantes, who more than
once steps aside from the subject on which he happens to be engaged to
praise Soto, it seems to have been the result of a sincere personal
friendship.
The truth is, that the Angelica, although so much praised, was never
finished or reprinted, and is now rarely seen and more rarely read.
It is a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso,” and relates the story
of the heroine after her marriage, down to the time when she recovers
her kingdom of Cathay, which had been violently wrested from her by
a rival queen. It is extravagant in its adventures, and awkward in
its machinery, especially in whatever relates to Demogorgon and the
agencies under his control. But its chief fault is its dulness. Its
whole movement is as far as possible removed from the life and gayety
of its great prototype; and, as if to add to the wearisomeness of its
uninteresting characters and languid style, one of De Soto’s friends
has added to each canto a prose explanation of its imagined moral
meanings and tendency, which, in a great majority of cases, it seems
impossible should have been in the author’s mind when he wrote the
poem.[816]
[816] “Primera Parte de la Angélica de Luis Barahona de Soto,”
Granada, 1586, 4to. My copy contains a license to reprint from
it, dated July 15, 1805; but, like many other projects of the
sort in relation to old Spanish literature, this one was not
carried through. A notice of De Soto is to be found in Sedano
(Parnaso, Tom. II. p. xxxi.); but the pleasantest idea of him
and of his agreeable social relations is to be gathered from a
poetical epistle to him by Christóval de Mesa (Rimas, 1611, f.
200);--from several poems in Silvestre (ed. 1599, ff. 325, 333,
334);--and from the notices of him by Cervantes in his “Galatea,”
and in the Don Quixote, (Parte I. c. 6, and Parte II. c. 1),
together with the facts collected in the two last places by the
commentators.--Gerónimo de Huerta, then a young man, published in
1588, at Alcalá, his “Florando de Castilla, Lauro de Cavalleros,
en Ottava Rima,”--an heroic poem it is called, but still, it is
said, in the manner of Ariosto. It is noticed, Antonio, Bib.
Nov., Tom. I. p. 587, and Mayans, Cartas de Varios Autores, Tom.
II., 1773, p. 36; but I have never seen it.
Of the still more extravagant continuation of the “Orlando” by Lope de
Vega we have already spoken; and of the fragment on the same subject
by Quevedo it is not necessary to speak at all. But the “Bernardo” of
Balbuena, which belongs to the same period, must not be overlooked. It
is one of the two or three favored poems of its class in the language;
written in the fervor of the author’s youth, and published in 1624,
when his age and ecclesiastical honors made him doubt whether his
dignity would permit him any longer to claim it as his own.
It is on the constantly recurring subject of Bernardo del Carpio; but
it takes from the old traditions only the slight outline of that hero’s
history, and then fills up the space between his first presentation at
the court of his uncle, Alfonso the Chaste, and the death of Roland at
Roncesvalles, with enchantments and giants, travels through the air and
over the sea, in countries known and in countries impossible, amidst
adventures as wild as the fancies of Ariosto, and more akin to his free
and joyous spirit than any thing else of the sort in the language. Many
of the descriptions are rich and beautiful; worthy of the author of
“The Age of Gold” and “The Grandeur of Mexico.” Some of the episodes
are full of interest in themselves, and happy in their position. Its
general structure is suited to the rules of its class,--if rules there
be for such a poem as the “Orlando Furioso.” And the versification
is almost always good;--easy where facility is required, and grave
or solemn, as the subject changes and becomes more lofty. But it has
one capital defect. It is fatally long;--thrice as long as the Iliad.
There seems, in truth, as we read on, no end to its episodes, which are
involved in each other till we entirely lose the thread that connects
them; and as for its crowds of characters, they come like shadows, and
so depart, leaving often no trace behind them, except a most indistinct
recollection of their wild adventures.[817]
[817] “El Bernardo, Poema Heróico del Doctor Don Bernardo de
Balbuena,” Madrid, 1624, 4to, and 1808, 3 tom. 8vo, containing
about forty-five thousand lines, but abridged by Quintana, in the
second volume of his “Poesías Selectas, Musa Épica,” with skill
and judgment, to less than one third of that length.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
NARRATIVE POEMS ON SUBJECTS FROM CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY.--BOSCAN,
MENDOZA, SILVESTRE, MONTEMAYOR, VILLEGAS, PEREZ, CEPEDA, GÓNGORA,
VILLAMEDIANA, PANTALEON, AND OTHERS.--NARRATIVE POEMS ON MISCELLANEOUS
SUBJECTS.--SALAS, SILVEIRA, ZARATE.--MOCK-HEROIC NARRATIVE
POEMS.--ALDANA, CHRESPO, VILLAVICIOSA AND HIS MOSQUEA.--SERIOUS
HISTORICAL POEMS.--CORTEREAL, RUFO, VEZILLA CASTELLANOS AND OTHERS,
MESA, CUEVA, EL PINCIANO, MOSQUERA, VASCONCELLOS, FERREIRA, FIGUEROA,
ESQUILACHE.--FAILURE OF NARRATIVE AND HEROIC POETRY ON NATIONAL
SUBJECTS.
There was little tendency in Spain, during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, to take subjects for the long narrative and
heroic poems that were so characteristic of the country from ancient
history or fable. Shorter and in general more interesting tales, imbued
with the old national spirit, were, however, early attempted out of
classical materials. The “Leander” of Boscan, a gentle and pleasing
poem, in about three thousand lines of blank verse, is to be dated as
early as 1540, and is one of them. Diego de Mendoza, Boscan’s friend,
followed, with his “Adonis, Hippomenes, and Atalanta,” but in the
Italian octave stanza, and with less success. Silvestre’s “Daphne and
Apollo” and his “Pyramus and Thisbe,” both of them written in the old
Castilian verse, are of the same period and more genial, but they were
unfortunate in their effects, if they provoked the poems on “Pyramus
and Thisbe” by Montemayor and by Antonio Villegas, or that on “Daphne”
by Perez, in the second book of his continuation of the “Diana.”[818]
[818] The story of “Leander” fills a large part of the third
book of Boscan and Garcilasso’s Works in the original edition of
1543.--Diego de Mendoza’s “Adonis,” which is about half as long,
and on which the old statesman is said to have valued himself
very much, is in his Works, 1610, pp. 48-65.--Silvestre’s poems,
mentioned in the text, with two others, something like them, make
up the whole of the second book of his Works, 1599.--Montemayor’s
“Pyramus,” in the short ten-line stanzas, is at the end of the
“Diana,” in the edition of 1614.--The “Pyramus” of Ant. de
Villegas is in his “Inventario,” 1577, and is in _terza rima_,
which, like the other Italian measures attempted by him, he
manages awkwardly.--The “Daphne” of Perez is in various measures,
and better deserves reading in old Bart. Yong’s version of
it than it does in the original.--I might have added to the
foregoing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” of Castillejo, (Obras, 1598,
ff. 68, etc.), pleasantly written in the old Castilian short
verse, when he was twenty-eight years old, and living in Germany;
but it is so much a translation from Ovid, that it hardly belongs
here.
The more formal effort of Romero de Cepeda on “The Destruction of
Troy,” published in 1582, is not better than the rest. It has, however,
the merit of being written more in the old national tone than almost
any thing of the kind; for it is in the ancient stanza of ten short
lines, and has a fluency and facility that make it sound sometimes like
the elder ballad poetry. But it extends to ten cantos, and is, after
all, the story to which we have always been accustomed, except that it
makes Æneas--against whom the Spanish poets and chroniclers seem to
have entertained a thorough ill-will--a traitor to his country and an
accomplice in its ruin.[819]
[819] Obras de Romero de Cepeda, Sevilla, 1582, 4to. The poem
alluded to is entitled “El Infelice Robo de Elena Reyna de
Esparta por Paris, _Infante_ Troyano, del qual sucedió la
Sangrienta Destruycion de Troya.” It begins _ab ovo Ledæ_, and,
going through about two thousand lines, ends with the death of
six hundred thousand Trojans. The shorter poems in the volume are
sometimes agreeable.
The poem of Manuel de Gallegos, entitled “Gigantomachia,” and
published at Lisbon, 1628, 4to, is also, like that of Cepeda,
on a classical subject, being devoted to the war of the Giants
against the Gods. Its author was a Portuguese, who lived many
years at Madrid in intimacy with Lope de Vega, and wrote
occasionally for the Spanish stage, but returned at last to his
native country, and died there in 1665. His “Gigantomachia,” in
about three hundred and forty octave stanzas, divided into five
short books, is written, for the period when it appeared, in a
pure style, but is a very dull poem.
But with the appearance of Góngora, simplicity such as Cepeda’s
ceased in this class of poems almost entirely. Nothing, indeed, was
more characteristic of the extravagance in which this great poetical
heresiarch indulged himself than his monstrous poem,--half lyrical,
half narrative, and wholly absurd,--which he called “The Fable of
Polyphemus”; and nothing became more characteristic of his school than
the similar poems in imitation of the Polyphemus which commonly passed
under the designation he gave them,--that of _Fábulas_. Such were
the “Phaeton,” the “Daphne,” and the “Europa” of his great admirer,
Count Villamediana. Such were several poems by Pantaleon, and, among
them, his “Fábula de Eco,” which he dedicated to Góngora. Such was
Moncayo’s “Atalanta,” a long heroic poem in twelve cantos, published
as a separate work; and his “Venus and Adonis,” found among his
miscellanies. And such, too, were Villalpando’s “Love Enamoured, or
Cupid and Psyche”; Salazar’s “Eurydice”; and several more of the same
class and with the same name;--all worthless, and all published between
the time when Góngora appeared and the end of the century.[820]
[820] These poems are all to be found in the works of their
respective authors, elsewhere referred to, except two. The first
is the “Atalanta y Hipomenes,” by Moncayo, Marques de San Felice,
(Zaragoza, 1656, 4to), in octave stanzas, about eight thousand
lines long, in which he manages to introduce much of the history
of Aragon, his native country; a general account of its men of
letters, who were his contemporaries; and, in canto fifth, all
the Aragonese ladies he admired, whose number is not small. The
other poem is the “Amor Enamorado,” which Jacinto de Villalpando
published (Zaragoça, 1655, 12mo) under the name of “Fabio
Clymente”; and which, like the last, is in octave stanzas, but
only about half as long. See, also, Latassa, Bib. Nueva, Tom III.
p. 272.
* * * * *
Of heroic poems on miscellaneous subjects, a few were produced
during the same period, but none of value. The first that needs to
be mentioned is that of Yague de Salas, on “The Lovers of Teruel,”
published in 1616, and preceded by an extraordinary array of laudatory
verses, among which are sonnets by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. It is on
the tragical fate of two young and faithful lovers, who, after the most
cruel trials, died at almost the same moment, victims of their passion
for each other,--the story on which, as we have already noticed,
Montalvan founded one of his best dramas. Salas calls his poem a tragic
epic, and it consists of twenty-six long cantos, comprehending, not
only the sad tale of the lovers themselves, which really ends in the
seventeenth canto, but a large part of the history of the kingdom of
Aragon and the whole history of the little town of Teruel. He declares
his story to be absolutely authentic; and in the Preface he appeals
for the truth of his assertion to the traditions of Teruel, of whose
municipality he had formerly been syndic and was then secretary.
But his statements were early called in question, and, to sustain
them, he produced, in 1619, the copy of a paper which he professed to
have found in the archives of Teruel, and which contains, under the
date of 1217, a full account of the two lovers, with a notice of the
discovery and reinterment of their unchanged bodies in the church of
San Pedro, in 1555. This seems to have quieted the doubts that had
been raised; and for a long time afterwards, poets and tragic writers
resorted freely to a story so truly Spanish in its union of love
and religion, as if its authenticity were no longer questionable.
But since 1806, when the facts and documents in relation to it were
collected and published, there seems no reasonable doubt that the
whole is a fiction, founded on a tradition already used by Artieda in
a dull drama, and still floating about at the time when Salas lived,
to which, when urged by his skeptical neighbours, he gave a distinct
form. But the popular faith was too well settled to be disturbed by
antiquarian investigations, and the remains of the lovers of Teruel in
the cloisters of Saint Peter are still visited by faithful and devout
hearts, who look upon them with sincere awe, as mysterious witnesses
left there by Heaven, that they may testify, through all generations,
to the truth and beauty of a love stronger than the grave.[821]
[821] “Los Amantes de Teruel, Epopeya Trágica, con la
Restauracion de España por la Parte de Sobrarbe y Conquista del
Reino de Valencia, por Juan Yague de Salas,” Valencia, 1616,
12mo. The latter part of it is much occupied with a certain
Friar John and a certain Friar Peter, who were great saints in
Teruel, and with the conquest of Valencia by Don Jaume of Aragon.
The poetry of the whole, it is not necessary to add, is naught.
The antiquarian investigation of the truth of the story of the
lovers is in a modest pamphlet entitled “Noticias Históricas
sobre los Amantes de Teruel, por Don Isidro de Antillon” (Madrid,
1806, 18mo);--a respectable Professor of History in the College
of the Nobles at Madrid. (Latassa, Bib. Nueva, Tom. VI. p.
123). It leaves no reasonable doubt about the forgery of Salas,
which, moreover, is done very clumsily. Ford, in his admirable
“Hand-Book of Spain,” (London, 1845, 8vo, p. 874), implies that
the tomb of the lovers is still much visited. It stands now in
the cloisters of St. Peter, whither, in 1709, in consequence
of alterations in the church, their bodies were removed;--much
decayed, says Antillon, notwithstanding the claim set up that
they are imperishable. The story of the lovers of Teruel has
often been resorted to, and, among others in our own time, by
Juan Eugenio Harzenbusch, in his drama, “Los Amantes de Teruel,”
and by an anonymous author in a tale with the same title, that
appeared at Valencia, 1838, 2 tom. 18mo. In the Preface to the
last, another of the certificates of Yague de Salas to the truth
of the story is produced for the first time, but adds nothing to
its probability. See _ante_, pp. 301-304.
The attempt of Lope de Vega, in his “Jerusalem Conquered,” to rival
Tasso, turned the thoughts of other ambitious poets in the same
direction, and the result was two epics that are not yet quite
forgotten. The first is the “Macabeo” of Silveira, a Portuguese, who,
after living long at the court of Spain, accompanied the head of the
great house of the Guzmans when that nobleman was made viceroy of
Naples, and published there, in 1638, this poem, to the composition of
which he had given twenty-two years. The subject is the restoration
of Jerusalem by Judas Maccabæus,--the same which Tasso had at one time
chosen for his own epic. But Silveira had not the genius of Tasso.
He has, it is true, succeeded in filling twenty cantos with octave
stanzas, as Tasso did; but there the resemblance stops. The “Macabeo,”
besides being written in the affected style of Góngora, is wanting in
spirit, interest, and poetry throughout.[822]
[822] “El Macabeo, Poema Heróico de Miguel de Silveira,” Nápoles,
1638, 4to. Castro (Biblioteca, Tom. I. p. 626) makes Silveira
a converted Jew, and Barbosa places his death at 1636; but the
Dedication of “El Sol Vencido,” a short, worthless poem, written
to flatter the Vice-Queen of Naples, is dated 20 April, 1639, and
was printed there that year.
The other contemporary poem of the same class is better, but does
not rise to the dignity of success. It is by Zarate, a poet long
attached to Rodrigo Calderon, the adventurer who, under the title
of Marques de Siete Iglesias, rose to the first places in the state
in the time of Philip the Third, and employed Zarate as one of his
secretaries. Zarate, however, was gentle and wise, and, having occupied
himself much with poetry in the days of his prosperity, found it a
pleasant resource in the days of adversity. In 1648, he published
“The Discovery of the Cross,” which, if we may trust an intimation in
the “Persiles and Sigismunda” of Cervantes, he must have begun thirty
years before, and which had undoubtedly been finished and licensed
twenty years when it appeared in print. But Zarate mistook the nature
of his subject. Instead of confining himself to the pious traditions
of the Empress Helena and the ascertained achievements of Constantine
against Maxentius, he has filled up his canvas with an impossible
and uninteresting contest between Constantine and an imaginary king
of Persia on the banks of the Euphrates, and so made out a long
poem, little connected in its different parts, and, though dry and
monotonous in its general tone, unequal in its execution; some portions
of it being simple and dignified, while others show a taste almost as
bad as that which disfigures the “Macabeo” of Silveira, and of quite
the same sort.[823]
[823] “Poema Heróico de la Invencion de la Cruz, por Fr. Lopez de
Zarate,” Madrid, 1648, 4to; twenty-two cantos and four hundred
pages of octave stanzas. The infernal councils and many other
parts show it to be an imitation of Tasso. The notice of his life
by Sedano (Parnaso, Tom. VIII. p. xxiv.) is sufficient; but that
by Antonio is more touching, and reads like a tribute of personal
regard. Zarate died in 1658, above seventy years old. Semanario
Pintoresco, 1845, p. 82.
* * * * *
But there was always a tendency to a spirit of caricature in Spanish
literature,--perhaps owing to its inherent stateliness and dignity;
for these are qualities which, when carried to excess, almost surely
provoke ridicule. At least, as we know, parody appeared early among the
ballads, and was always prominent in the theatres; to say nothing of
romantic fiction, where Don Quixote is the great monument of its glory
for all countries and for all ages.[824]
[824] The continual parody of the _gracioso_ on the hero shows
what was the tendency of the Spanish stage in this particular.
But there are also plays that are entirely burlesque, such as
“The Death of Baldovinos,” at the end of Cancer’s Works, 1651,
which is a parody on the old ballads and traditions respecting
that paladin; and the “Cavallero de Olmedo,” a favorite play,
by Francisco Felix de Monteser, which is in the volume entitled
“Mejor Libro de las Mejores Comedias,” Madrid, 1653, and which is
a parody of a play with the same title in the Comedias de Lope de
Vega, Vol. XXIV., Zaragoza, 1641.
That the long and multitudinous narrative poems of Spain should call
forth mock-heroics was, therefore, in keeping with the rest of the
national character; and though the number of such caricatures is
not large, they have a merit quite equal to that of their serious
prototypes. The first in the order of time seems to be lost. It was
written by Cosmé de Aldana, who, in the latter part of the sixteenth
century, was attached to the Grand Constable Velasco, when he was
sent to govern Milan. In his capacity of poet, Aldana, it is said,
plied his master with flattery and sonnets, till one day the Constable
jestingly besought him to desist, and called him “an ass.” The cavalier
could not draw his sword on his friend and patron, but the poet
determined to avenge the affront offered to his genius. He did so in
a long poem, entitled the “Asneida,” which, on every page, seemed to
cry out to the governor, “You are a greater ass than I am.” But it was
hardly finished when the unhappy Aldana died, and the copies of his
poem were so diligently sought for and so faithfully destroyed, that it
seems to be one of the few books we should be curious to see, which,
after having been once printed, have entirely disappeared from the
world.[825]
[825] Cosmé was editor of the poems of his brother, Francisco
de Aldana, in 1593. (Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 256.) He
wrote in Italian and printed at Florence as early as 1578;
but Velasco did not go as governor to Milan till after 1586.
(Salazar, Dignidades, f. 131.) The only account I have seen of
the “Asneida” is in Figueroa’s “Pasagero,” 1617, f. 127.
The next mock-heroic has also something mysterious about it. It is
called “The Death, Burial, and Honors of Chrespina Maranzmana, the
Cat of Juan Chrespo,” and was published at Paris in 1604, under what
seems to be the pseudonyme of “Cintio Merctisso.” The first canto
gives an account of Chrespina’s death; the second, of the _pésames_ or
condolences offered to her children; and the third and last, of the
public tributes to her memory, including the sermon preached at her
interment. The whole is done in the true spirit of such a poem,--grave
in form, and quaint and amusing in its details. Thus, when the children
are gathered round the death-bed of their venerable mother, among other
directions and commands, she tells them very solemnly:--
Up in the concave of the tiles, and near
That firm-set wall the north wind whistles by,
Close to the spot the cricket chose last year,
In a blind corner, far from every eye,
Beneath a brick that hides the treasure dear,
Five choice sardines in secret darkness lie;--
These, brethren-like, I charge you, take by shares,
And also all the rest, to which you may be heirs.
Moreover, you will find, in heaps piled fair,--
Proofs of successful toil to build a name,--
A thousand wings and legs of birds picked bare,
And cloaks of quadrupeds, both wild and tame,
All which your father had collected there,
To serve as trophies of an honest fame;--
These keep, and count them better than all prey;
Nor give them, e’en for ease, or sleep, or life, away.[826]
[826]
En la concavidad del tejadillo,
Hazia los paredones del gallego,
Junto adonde morava antaño el grillo,
En un rincon secreto, oscuro y ciego,
Escondidos debaxo de un ladrillo,
Estan cinco sardinas, lo que os ruego
Como hermanos partays, y seays hermanos
En quanto mas viniere á vuestras manos.
Hallareys, item mas, amontonadas,
De gloria y fama prosperos deseos,
Alas y patas de mil aves tragadas,
De quadrupides pieles y manteos,
Que vuestro padre alli dexo allegadas
Por victoriosas señas y tropheos;
Estas tened en mas que la comida,
Qu’el descanso, qu’el sueño, y que la vida.
p. 14.
It is probably a satire on some event notorious at the time and long
since forgotten; but however its origin may be explained, it is one of
the best imitations extant of the Italian mock-heroics. It has, too,
the rare merit of being short.[827]
[827] “La Muerte, Entierro y Honras de Chrespina Maranzmana, Gata
de Juan Chrespo, en tres cantos de octava rima, intitulados la
Gaticida, compuesta por Cintio Merctisso, Español, Paris, por
Nicolo Molinero,” 1604, 12mo, pp. 52. I know nothing of the poem
or its author, except what is to be found in this volume, of
which I have never met even with a bibliographical notice, and of
which I have seen only one copy,--that belonging to my friend Don
Pascual de Gayangos, of Madrid.
Much better known than the Chrespina is the “Mosquea,” by
Villaviciosa;--a rich and fortunate ecclesiastic, who was born at
Siguenza in 1589, and died at Cuenca in 1658. The Mosquea, which is
the war of the flies and the ants, was printed in 1615; but though
the author lived so long afterwards, he left nothing else to mark the
genius of which this poem gives unquestionable proof. It is, as may
be imagined, an imitation of the “Batrachomyomachia,” attributed to
Homer, and the storm in the third canto is taken, with some minuteness
in the spirit of its parody, from the storm in the first book of the
Æneid. Still the Mosquea is as original as the nature of such a poem
requires it to be. It has, besides, a simple and well-constructed
fable; and notwithstanding it is protracted to twelve cantos, the
curiosity of the reader is sustained to the last.
A war breaks out in the midst of the festivities of a tournament in
the capital city of the flies, which the false ants had chosen as a
moment when they could advantageously interrupt the peace that had long
subsisted between them and their ancient enemies. The heathen gods
are introduced, as they are in the Iliad,--the other insects become
allies in the great quarrel, after the manner of all heroic poems,--the
neighbouring chiefs come in,--there is an Achilles on one side, and
an Æneas on the other,--the characters of the principal personages
are skilfully drawn and sharply distinguished,--and the catastrophe
is a tremendous battle, filling the last two cantos, in which the
flies are defeated and their brilliant leader made the victim of his
own rashness. The faults of the poem are its pedantry and length.
Its merits are the richness and variety of its poetical conceptions,
the ingenious delicacy with which the minutest circumstances in the
condition of its insect heroes are described, and the air of reality,
which, notwithstanding the secret satire that is never entirely absent,
is given to the whole by the seeming earnestness of its tone. It ends,
precisely where it should, with the expiring breath of the principal
hero.[828]
[828] The first edition of the “Mosquea” was printed in small
12mo at Cuenca, when its author was twenty-six years old;--the
third is Sancha’s, Madrid, 1777, 12mo, with a life, from
which it appears, that, besides being a faithful officer of
the Inquisition himself, and making a good fortune out of it,
Villaviciosa exhorted his family, by his last will, to devote
themselves in all future time to its holy service with grateful
zeal. See, also, the Spanish translation of Sismondi, Sevilla,
8vo, Tom. I., 1841, p. 354.
No other mock-heroic poem followed that of Villaviciosa during this
period, except “The War of the Cats,” by Lope de Vega, who, in his
ambition for universal conquest, seized on this, as he did on every
other department of the national literature. But the “Gatomachia,”
which is one of the very best of his efforts, has already been noticed.
We turn, therefore, again to the true heroic poems, devoted to national
subjects, whose current flows no less amply and gravely, down to the
middle of the seventeenth century, than it did when it first began,
and continues through its whole course no less characteristic of the
national genius and temper than we have seen it in the poems on Charles
the Fifth and his achievements.
The favorite hero of the next age, Don John of Austria, son of the
Emperor, was the occasion of two poems, with which we naturally resume
the examination of this curious series.[829] The first of them is
on the battle of Lepanto, and was published in 1578, the year of
Don John’s untimely death. The author, Cortereal, was a Portuguese
gentleman of rank and fortune, who distinguished himself as the
commander of an expedition against the infidels on the coasts of Africa
and Asia, in 1571, and died before 1593; but, being tired of fame,
passed the last twenty years of his life at Evora, and devoted himself
to poetry and to the kindred arts of music and painting.
[829] A vast number of tributes were paid by contemporary men
of letters to Don John of Austria; but among them none is more
curious than a Latin poem in two books, containing seventeen
or eighteen hundred hexameters and pentameters, the work of a
negro, who had been brought as an infant from Africa, and who
by his learning rose to be professor of Latin and Greek in the
school attached to the cathedral of Granada. He is the same
person noticed by Cervantes as “el negro Juan Latino,” in a poem
prefixed to the Don Quixote. His volume of Latin verses on the
birth of Ferdinand, the son of Philip II., on Pope Pius V., on
Don John of Austria, and on the city of Granada, making above
a hundred and sixty pages in small quarto, printed at Granada
in 1573, is not only one of the rarest books in the world, but
is one of the most remarkable illustrations of the intellectual
faculties and possible accomplishments of the African race. The
author himself says he was brought to Spain from Ethiopia, and
was, until his emancipation, a slave to the grandson of the
famous Gonsalvo de Córdova. His Latin verse is respectable, and,
from his singular success as a scholar, he was commonly called
Joannes Latinus, a _sobriquet_ under which he is frequently
mentioned, and which was made the title of a play, I presume
about him, by Lopez de Enciso, called “Juan Latino.” He was
respectably married to a lady of Granada, who fell in love with
him, as Eloisa did with Abelard, while he was teaching her; and
after his death, which occurred later than 1573, his wife and
children erected a monument to his memory in the church of Sta.
Ana, in that city, inscribing it with an epitaph, in which he is
styled “Filius Æthiopum, prolesque nigerrima patrum.” Antonio,
Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 716. Don Quixote, ed. Clemencin, Tom. I. p.
lx., note.
It may not be amiss here to add, that another negro is celebrated
in a play, written in tolerable Castilian, and claiming, at the
end, to be founded in fact. It is called “El Valiente Negro en
Flandes,” and is found in Tom. XXXI., 1638, of the collection
of Comedias printed at Barcelona and Saragossa. The negro in
question, however, was not, like Juan Latino, a native African,
but was a slave born in Merida, and was distinguished only as a
soldier, serving with great honor under the Duke of Alva, and
enjoying the favor of that severe general.
It was amidst the beautiful and romantic nature that surrounded him
during the quiet conclusion of his bustling life, that he wrote three
long poems;--two in Portuguese, which were soon translated into Spanish
and published; and one, originally composed in Spanish, and entitled
“The Most Happy Victory granted by Heaven to the Lord Don John of
Austria, in the Gulf of Lepanto, over the Mighty Ottoman Armada.”
It is in fifteen cantos of blank verse, and is dedicated to Philip
the Second, who, contrary to his custom, acknowledged the compliment
by a flattering letter. The poem opens with a dream brought to the
Sultan from the infernal regions by the goddess of war, and inciting
him to make an attack on the Christians; but excepting this, and the
occasional use of similar machinery afterwards, it is merely a dull
historical account of the war, ending with the great sea-fight itself,
which is the subject of the last three cantos.[830]
[830] “Felicissima Victoria concedida del Cielo al Señor Don
Juan d’Austria, etc., compuesta por Hierónimo de Cortereal,
Cavallero Portugues,” s. l. 1578, 8vo, with curious wood-cuts;
probably printed at Lisbon. (Life, in Barbosa, Tom. II. p. 495.)
His “Suceso do Segundo Cerco de Diu,” in twenty-one cantos, on
the siege, or rather defence, of Diu, in the East Indies, in
1546, was published in 1574, and translated into Spanish by the
well-known poet, Pedro de Padilla, who published his version in
1597. His “Naufragio y Lastimoso Suceso da Perdiçaõ de Manuel
de Souza de Sepúlveda,” etc., (Lisboa, 1594), in seventeen
cantos, was translated into Spanish by Francisco de Contreras,
with the title of “Nave Trágica de la India de Portugal,” 1624.
This Manuel de Souza, who had held a distinguished office in
Portuguese India, and who had perished miserably by shipwreck
near the Cape of Good Hope, in 1553, as he was returning home,
was a connection of Cortereal by marriage. Denis, Chroniques,
etc., Tom. II. p. 79.
The other contemporary poem on Don John of Austria was still more
solemnly devoted to his memory. It was written by Juan Rufo Gutierrez,
a person much trusted in the government of Córdova, and expressly sent
by that city to Don John, whose service he seems never afterwards to
have left. He was, as he tells us, especially charged by that prince to
write his history, and received from him the materials for his task.
The result, after ten years of labor, was a long chronicling poem
called the “Austriada,” printed in 1584. It begins, in the first four
cantos, with the rebellion of the Moors in the Alpuxarras; and then,
after giving us the birth and education of Don John, as the general
sent to subdue them, goes on with his subsequent life and adventures,
and ends, in the twenty-fourth canto, with the battle of Lepanto and
the promise of a continuation.
When it was thus far finished, which was not till after the death of
the prince to whose glory it is dedicated, it was solemnly presented,
both by the city of Córdova and by the Cortes of the kingdom, in
separate letters, to Philip the Second, asking for it his especial
favor, as for a work “that it seemed to them must last for many ages.”
The king received it graciously, and gave the author five hundred
ducats, regarding it, perhaps, with secret satisfaction, as a funeral
monument to one whose life had been so brilliant that his death was not
unwelcome. With such patronage, it soon passed through three editions;
but it had no real merit, except in the skilful construction of its
octave stanzas, and in some of its picturesque historical details, and
was, therefore, soon forgotten.[831]
[831] “La Austriada de Juan Rufo, Jurado de la Ciudad de
Córdoba,” Madrid, 1584, 12mo, ff. 447. There are editions of 1585
and 1587, and it is extravagantly praised by Cervantes, in a
prefatory sonnet, and in the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library.
Rufo, when he was to be presented to Philip II.,--probably at the
time he offered his poem and dedication,--said he had prepared
himself fully for the reception, but lost all presence of mind,
from the severity of that monarch’s appearance. (Baltasar
Porreño, Dichos y Hechos de Philipe II., Bruselas, 1666, 12mo, p.
39.) The best of Rufo’s works is his Letter to his young Son, at
the end of his “Apotegmas,” already noticed;--the same son, Luis,
who afterwards became a distinguished painter at Rome.
In the neighbourhood of the city of Leon there are,--or in the
sixteenth century there were--three imperfect Roman inscriptions cut
into the living rock; two of them referring to Curienus, a Spaniard,
who had successfully resisted the Imperial armies in the reign of
Domitian, and the third to Polma, a lady, whose marriage to her
lover, Canioseco, is thus singularly recorded. On these inscriptions,
Vezilla Castellanos, a native of the territory where the persons they
commemorate are supposed to have lived, has constructed a romantic
poem, in twenty-nine cantos, called “Leon in Spain,” which he published
in 1586.
Its main subject, however, in the last fifteen cantos, is the tribute
of a hundred damsels, which the usurper Mauregato covenanted by
treaty to pay annually to the Moors, and which, by the assistance of
the apostle Saint James, King Ramiro successfully refused to pay any
longer. Castellanos, therefore, passes lightly over the long period
intervening between the time of Domitian and that of the war of Pelayo,
giving only a few sketches from its Christian history, and then, in
the twenty-ninth canto, brings to a conclusion so much of his poem
as relates to the Moorish tribute, without, however, reaching the
ultimate limit he had originally proposed to himself. But it is long
enough. Some parts of the Roman fiction are pleasing, but the rest
of the poem shows that Castellanos is only what he calls himself in
the Preface,--“A modest poetical historian, or historical poet; an
imitator and apprentice of those who have employed poetry to record
such memorable things as kindle the minds of men and raise them to a
Christian and devout reverence for the saints, to an honorable exercise
of arms, to the defence of God’s holy law, and to the loyal service of
the king.”[832] If his poem have any subject, it is the history of the
city of Leon.
[832] “Primera y Segunda Parte del Leon de España, por Pedro de
la Vezilla Castellanos,” Salamanca, 1586, 12mo, ff. 369. The
story of the gross tribute of the damsels has probably some
foundation in fact; one proof of which is, that the old General
Chronicle (Parte III., c. 8) seems a little unwilling to tell a
tale so discreditable to Spain. Mariana admits it, and Lobera,
in his “Historia de las Grandezas, etc., de Leon,” (Valladolid,
1596, 4to, Parte II. c. 24) gives it in full, as unquestionable.
Leon is still often called Leon de _España_, as it is in the poem
of Castellanos, to distinguish it from Lyons in France, Leon de
_Francia_.
In the course of the next four years after the appearance of this
rhymed chronicle of Leon, we find no less than three other long poems
connected with the national history: one by Miguel Giner, on the siege
of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese, who succeeded the unfortunate Don John
of Austria as generalissimo of Philip the Second in the war of the
Netherlands;--another, in twenty-one cantos, by Edward or Duarte Diaz,
a Portuguese, on the taking of Granada by the Catholic sovereigns;--and
the third by Lorenzo de Zamora, on the history of Saguntum and of its
siege by Hannibal, in which, preserving the outline of that early story
so far as it was well settled, he has wildly mixed up love-scenes,
tournaments, and adventures, suited only to the age of chivalry. Taken
together, they show how strong was the passion for narrative verse in
Spain, where, in so short a time, it produced three such poems.[833]
[833] “Sitio y Toma de Amberes, por Miguel Giner,” Zaragoza,
1587, 8vo.--“La Conquista que hicieron los Reyes Católicos en
Granada, por Edoardo Diaz,” 1590, 8vo, Barbosa, Tom. I. p. 730;
besides which, Diaz, who was long a soldier in the Spanish
service, and wrote good Castilian, published, in 1592, a volume
of verse in Spanish and Portuguese.--“De la Historia de Sagunto,
Numancia, y Cartago, compuesta por Lorencio de Zamora, Natural
de Ocaña,” Alcalá, 1589, 4to,--nineteen cantos of _ottava rima_,
and about five hundred pages, ending abruptly and promising more.
It was written, the author says, when he was eighteen years old;
but though he lived to be an old man, and died in 1614, having
printed several religious books, he never went farther with this
poem. Antonio, Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p. 11.