Christóval de Mesa, who, between 1594 and 1612, published three more
national heroic poems;--the first on the tradition, that the body of
Saint James, after his martyrdom at Jerusalem, was miraculously carried
to Spain and deposited at Compostella, where that saint has ever since
been worshipped as the especial patron of the whole kingdom;--the
second on Pelayo and the recovery of Spain from the Moors down to the
battle of Covadonga;--and the third on the battle of Tolosa, which
broke the power of Mohammedanism and made sure the emancipation of the
whole Peninsula. All three, as well as Mesa’s elaborate translations
of the Æneid and Georgics, which followed them, are written in _ottava
rima_, and all three are dedicated to Philip the Third.
Of their author we know little, and that little is told chiefly by
himself in his pleasant poetical epistles, and especially in two
addressed to the Count of Lemos and one to the Count de Castro. From
these we learn, that, in his youth, he was addicted to the study of
Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Soto, as well as to the teachings
of Sanchez, the first Spanish scholar of his time; but that, later,
he lived five years in Italy, much connected with Tasso, and from
this time belonged entirely to the Italian school of Spanish poetry,
to which, as his works show, he had always been inclined. But, with
all his efforts,--and they were not few,--he found little favor or
patronage. The Count de Lemos refused to carry him to Naples as a part
of his poetical court, and the king took no notice of his long poems,
which, indeed, were no more worthy of favor than the rest of their
class that were then jostling and crowding one another in their efforts
to obtain the royal protection.[834]
[834] “Las Navas de Tolosa,” twenty cantos, Madrid, 1594,
12mo;--“La Restauracion de España,” ten cantos, Madrid, 1607,
12mo;--“El Patron de España,” six books, Madrid, 1611, 12mo, with
Rimas added. My copy of the last volume is one of the many proofs
that new title-pages with later dates were attached to Spanish
books that had been some time before the public. Mr. Southey,
to whom this copy once belonged, expresses his surprise, in a
MS. note on the fly-leaf, that the _last_ half of the volume
should be dated in 1611, while the _first_ half is dated in
1612. But the reason is, that the title-page to the Rimas comes
at p. 94, in the middle of a sheet, and could not conveniently
be cancelled and changed, as was the title-page to the “Patron
de España,” with which the volume opens. Mesa’s translations
are later;--the Æneid, Madrid, 1615, 12mo; and the Eclogues of
Virgil, to which he added a few more Rimas and the poor tragedy
of “Pompeio,” Madrid, 1618, 12mo. The _ottava rima_ seems to me
very cumbrous in both these translations, and unsuited to their
nature, though we are reconciled to it, and to the _terza rima_,
in the Metamorphoses of Ovid, by Viana, a Portuguese, printed at
Valladolid, in 1589, 4to; one of the happiest translations made
in the pure age of Castilian literature. The Iliad, which Mesa is
also supposed to have translated, was never printed. In one of
his epistles, (Rimas, 1611, f. 201), he says he was bred to the
law; and in another, (f. 205), that he loved to live in Castile,
though he was of Estremadura. In many places he alludes to his
poverty and to the neglect he suffered; and in a sonnet in his
last publication, (1618, f. 113), he shows a poor, craven spirit
in flattering the Count de Lemos, with whom he was offended for
not taking him to Naples.
Juan de la Cueva followed in the footsteps of Mesa. His “Bética,”
printed in 1603, is an heroic poem, in twenty-four cantos, on the
conquest of Seville by Saint Ferdinand. Its subject is good, and
its hero, who is the king himself, is no less so. But the poem is
a failure; heavy and uninteresting in its plan, and cold in its
execution;--for Cueva, who took his materials chiefly from the General
Chronicle of Saint Ferdinand’s son, was not able to mould them, as he
strove to do, into the form of the “Jerusalem Delivered.” The task
was, in fact, quite beyond his power. The most agreeable portion of
his work is that which involves the character of Tarfira, a personage
imitated from Tasso’s Clorinda; but, after all, the romantic episode of
which she is the heroine has great defects, and is too much interwoven
with the principal thread of the story. The general plan of the poem,
however, is less encumbered in its movement and more epic in its
structure than is common in those of its class in Spanish literature;
and the versification, though careless, is fluent and generally
harmonious.[835]
[835] “Conquista de la Bética, Poema Heróico de Juan de la
Cueva,” 1603, reprinted in the fourteenth and fifteenth volumes
of the collection of Fernandez, (Madrid, 1795), with a Preface,
which is, I think, by Quintana, and is very good. A notice of
Cueva occurs in the Spanish translation of Sismondi, Tom. I. p.
285; and a number of his unpublished works are said to be in
the possession of the Counts of Aguila in Seville. Semanario
Pintoresco, 1846, p. 250.
A physician and scholar of Valladolid, Alfonso Lopez,--commonly called
El Pinciano, from the Roman name of his native city,--wrote in his
youth a poem on the subject of Pelayo, but did not publish it till
1605, when he was already an old man. It supposes Pelayo to have been
misled by a dream from Lucifer to undertake a journey to Jerusalem,
and, when at the Holy Sepulchre, to have been undeceived by another
dream, and sent back for the emancipation of his country. This last
is the obvious and real subject of the poem, which has episodes and
machinery enough to explain all the history of Spain down to the time
of Philip the Third, to whom the “Pelayo” is dedicated. It is long,
like the rest of its class, and, though ushered into notice with an
air of much scholarship and pretension, it is written with little skill
in the versification, and is one of the most wearisome poems in the
language.[836]
[836] “El Pelayo del Pinciano,” Madrid, 1605, 12mo, twenty
cantos, filling above six hundred pages, with a poor attempt
at the end, after the manner of Tasso, to give an allegorical
interpretation to the whole. I notice in N. Antonio “La Iberiada,
de los Hechos de Scipion Africano, por Gaspar Savariego de Santa
Anna,” Valladolid, 1603, 8vo. I have never seen it. “La Patrona
de Madrid Restituida,” by Salas Barbadillo, an heroic poem in
honor of Our Lady of Atocha, printed in 1608, and reprinted,
Madrid, 1750, 12mo, which I possess, is worthless and does not
need to be noticed.
In 1612 two more similar epics were published. The first is “La
Numantina,” which is on the siege of Numantia and the history of Soria,
a town standing in the neighbourhood of Numantia, and claiming to be
its successor. The author, Francisco Mosquera de Barnuevo, who belonged
to an ancient and distinguished family there, not only wrote this poem
of fifteen cantos in honor of the territory where he was born, but
accompanied it with a prose history, as a sort of running commentary,
in which whatever relates to Soria, and especially the Barnuevos, is
not forgotten. It is throughout a very solemn piece of pedantry, and
its metaphysical agencies, such as Europe talking to Nemesis, and
Antiquity teaching the author, seem to be a good deal in the tone
of the old Mysteries, and are certainly any thing but poetical. The
other epic referred to is by Vasconcellos, a Portuguese, who had an
important command and fought bravely against Spain when his country was
emancipating itself from the Spanish yoke, but still wrote with purity,
in the Castilian, seventeen cantos, nominally on the expulsion of the
Moriscos, but really on the history of the whole Peninsula, from the
time of the first entrance of the Moors down to the final exile of the
last of their hated descendants by Philip the Third. But neither of
these poems is now remembered, and neither deserves to be.[837]
[837] “La Numantina del Licenciado Don Francisco Mosquera de
Barnuevo, etc., dirigida á la nobilissima Ciudad de Soria y á
sus doce Linages y Casas á ellas agregadas,” Sevilla, 1612, 4to.
He says “it was a book of his youth, printed when his hairs were
gray”; but it shows none of the judgment of mature years.
“La Liga deshecha por la Expulsion de los Moriscos de los Reynos
de España,” Madrid, 1612, 12mo. It was printed, therefore, long
before Vasconcellos fought against Spain, and contains fulsome
compliments to Philip III., which must afterwards have given
their author no pleasure. (Barbosa, Tom. II. p. 701.) The poem
consists of about twelve hundred octave stanzas.
“La España Defendida,” by Christ. Suarez de Figueroa, Madrid,
1612, 12mo, and Naples, 1644, belongs to the same date, making,
in fact, three heroic poems in one year.
From this point of time, such narrative poems, more or less approaching
an epic form, and devoted to the glory of Spain, become rare;--a
circumstance to be, in part, attributed to the success of Lope de Vega,
which gave to the national drama a prominence so brilliant. Still, in
the course of the next thirty years, two or three attempts were made
that should be noticed.
The first of them is by a Portuguese lady, Bernarda Ferreira, and is
called “Spain Emancipated”; a tedious poem, in two parts, the earlier
of which appeared in 1618, and the latter in 1673, long after its
author’s death. It is, in fact, a rhymed chronicle,--to the first part
of which the dates are regularly attached,--and was intended, no doubt,
to cover the whole seven centuries of Spanish history from the outbreak
of Pelayo to the fall of Granada, but it is finished no farther than
the reign of Alfonso the Wise, where it stops abruptly.
The second attempt is one of the most absurd known in literary history.
It was made by Vera y Figueroa, Count de la Roca, long the minister
of Spain at Venice, and the author of a pleasant prose treatise on
the Rights and Duties of an Ambassador. He began by translating
Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” but, just as his version was ready
to be published, he changed his purpose, and accommodated the whole
work--history, poetical ornaments, and all--to the delivery of Seville
from the Moors by Saint Ferdinand. The transformation is as complete as
any in Ovid, but certainly not as graceful;--a fact singularly apparent
in the second book, where Tasso’s beautiful and touching story of
Sophronia and Olindo is travestied by the corresponding one of Leocadia
and Galindo. As if to make the whole more grotesque and give it the air
of a grave caricature, the Spanish poem is composed throughout in the
old Castilian _redondillas_, and carried through exactly twenty books,
all running parallel to the twenty of the “Jerusalem Delivered.”
The last of the three attempts just referred to, and the last one
of the period that needs to be noticed, is the “Naples Recovered”
of Prince Esquilache, which, though written earlier, dates, by its
publication, from 1651. It is on the conquest of Naples in the middle
of the fifteenth century by Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon, who seems to
have been selected as its hero, in part, at least, because the Prince
of Esquilache could boast his descent from that truly great monarch.
The poem, however, is little worthy of its subject. The author avowedly
took great pains that it should have no more books than the Æneid; that
it should violate no historical proprieties; and that, in its episodes,
machinery, and style, as well as in its general fable and structure,
it should be rigorously conformed to the safest epic models. He even,
as he declares, had procured for it the crowning grace of a royal
approbation before he ventured to give it to the world. Still it is a
failure. It seems to foreshadow some of the severe and impoverishing
doctrines of the next century of Spanish literature, and is written
with a squeamish nicety in the versification that still further impairs
its spirit; so that the last of the class to which it belongs, if
it be not one of the most extravagant, is one of the most dull and
uninteresting.[838]
[838] “Hespaña Libertada, Parte Primera, por Doña Bernarda
Ferreira de Lacerda, dirigida al Rey Católico de las Hespañas,
Don Felipe Tercero deste Nombre, _nuestro_ Señor,” (Lisboa, 1618,
4to), was evidently intended as a compliment to the Spanish
usurpers, and, in this point of view, is as little creditable to
its author as it is in its poetical aspect. Parte Segunda was
published by her daughter, Lisboa, 1673, 4to. Bernarda de Lacerda
was a lady variously accomplished. Lope de Vega, who dedicated
to her his eclogue entitled “Phylis,” (Obras Sueltas, Tom. X.
p. 193), compliments her on her writing Latin with purity.
She published a volume of poetry, in Portuguese, Spanish, and
Italian, in 1634, and died in 1644.
“El Fernando, ó Sevilla Restaurada, Poema Heróico, escrito con
los Versos de la Gerusalemme Liberata, etc., por Don Juan Ant. de
Vera y Figueroa, Conde de la Roca,” etc., Milan, 1632, 4to, pp.
654. He died 1658. Antonio, _ad verb._
“Nápoles Recuperada por el Rey Don Alonso, Poema Heróico de D.
Francisco de Borja, Príncipe de Esquilache,” etc. Zaragoza, 1651,
Amberes, 1658, 4to. A notice of his honorable and adventurous
life will be given, when we speak of Spanish lyrical poetry,
where he was more successful than he was in epic.
There were two or three other poems called heroic that appeared
after these; but they do not need to be recalled. One of the most
absurd of them is the “Orfeo Militar,” in two parts, by Joan de
la Victoria Ovando; the first being on the siege of Vienna by
the Turks, and the second on that of Buda, both printed in 1688,
4to, at Malaga, where their author enjoyed a military office; but
neither, I think, was much read beyond the limits of the city
that produced them.
* * * * *
It is worth while, as we finish our notice of this remarkable series of
Spanish narrative and heroic poems, to recollect how long the passion
for them continued in Spain, and how distinctly they retained to the
last those ambitious feelings of national greatness which originally
gave them birth. For a century, during the reigns of Philip the Second,
Philip the Third, and Philip the Fourth, they were continually issuing
from the press, and were continually received with the same kind, if
not the same degree, of favor that had accompanied the old romances of
chivalry, which they had helped to supersede. Nor was this unnatural,
though it was extravagant. These old epic attempts were, in general,
founded on some of the deepest and noblest traits in the Castilian
character; and if that character had gone on rising in dignity and
developing itself under the three Philips, as it had under Ferdinand
and Isabella, there can be little doubt that the poetry built upon
it would have taken rank by the side of that produced under similar
impulses in Italy and England. But, unhappily, this was not the case.
These Spanish narrative poems devoted to the glory of their country
were produced when the national character was on the decline; and
as they sprang more directly from the essential elements of that
character, and depended more on its spirit, than did the similar poetry
of any other people in modern times, so they now more visibly declined
with it.
It is in vain, therefore, that the semblance of the feelings which
originally gave them birth is continued till the last; for the
substance is wanting. We mark, it is true, in nearly every one of
them, a proud patriotism, which is just as presumptuous and exclusive
under the weakest of the Philips as it was when Charles the Fifth wore
half the crowns of Europe; but we feel that it is degenerating into
a dreary, ungracious prejudice in favor of their own country, which
prevented its poets from looking abroad into the world beyond the
Pyrenees, where they could only see their cherished hopes of universal
empire disappointed, and other nations rising to the state and power
their own was so fast losing. We mark, too, throughout these epic
attempts, the indications to which we have been accustomed of what was
most peculiar in Spanish loyalty,--bold, turbulent, and encroaching
against all other authority exactly in proportion as it was faithful
and submissive to the highest; but we find it is now become a loyalty
which, largely as it may share the spirit of military glory, has lost
much of the sensitiveness of its ancient honor. And finally, though
we mark in nearly every one of them that deep feeling of reverence
for religion which had come down from the ages of contest with the
infidel power of the Moors, yet we find it now constantly mingling
the arrogant fierceness of worldly passion with the holiest of its
offerings, and submitting, in the spirit of blind faith and devotion,
to a bigotry whose decrees were written in blood. These multitudinous
Spanish heroic poems, therefore, that were produced out of the elements
of the national character when that character was falling into decay,
naturally bear the marks of their origin. Instead of reaching, by the
fervid enthusiasm of a true patriotism, of a proud loyalty, and of an
enlightened religion, the elevation to which they aspire, they sink
away, with few exceptions, into tedious, rhyming chronicles, in which
the national glory fails to excite the interest that would belong to
an earnest narrative of real events, without gaining in its stead any
thing from the inspirations of poetical genius.
CHAPTER XXIX.
LYRIC POETRY.--ITS CONDITION FROM THE TIME OF BOSCAN AND GARCILASSO DE
LA VEGA.--CANTORÁL, FIGUEROA, ESPINEL, MONTEMAYOR, BARAHONA DE SOTO,
RUFO, DAMIAN DE VEGAS, PADILLA, MALDONADO, LUIS DE LEON, FERNANDO
DE HERRERA AND HIS POETICAL LANGUAGE, ESPINOSA’S COLLECTION, MANOEL
DE PORTUGAL, MESA, LEDESMA AND THE CONCEPTISTAS.--CULTISMO, AND
SIMILAR BAD TASTE IN OTHER COUNTRIES.--GÓNGORA AND HIS FOLLOWERS,
VILLAMEDIANA, PARAVICINO, ROCA Y SERNA, ANTONIO DE VEGA, PANTALEON,
VIOLANTE DEL CIELO, MELO, MONCAYO, LA TORRE, VERGARA, ROZAS, ULLOA,
SALAZAR.--FASHION AND PREVALENCE OF THE SCHOOL OF GÓNGORA.--EFFORTS TO
OVERTURN IT BY LOPE DE VEGA, QUEVEDO, AND OTHERS.--MEDRANO, ALCAZAR,
ARGUIJO, BALVAS.
A decidedly lyric tendency is perceptible in Spanish literature from
the first. The ballads are full of it, and occasionally we find
snatches of songs that seem almost as old as the earliest ballads. All
this, of course, belongs to a period so remote and rude, that what
it produced was national, because Spain had as yet no intercourse
with other European countries that drew after it any of their culture
and refinement. Later, we have seen how the neighbouring Provençal
sometimes gave its measures and tones to the Castilian; and how both,
so far as Spain was concerned, were fashioned by the tastes of the
different courts of the country down to the time of Ferdinand and
Isabella.
But, from the next age, which was that of Boscan and Garcilasso, a
new element was introduced into Spanish lyric poetry; for, from that
period, not only the forms, but the genius, of the more cultivated
Italian are perceptible, in a manner that does not permit us for a
moment to question their great influence and final success. Still, the
difference between the characters of the two nations was so great, that
the poetry of Spain could not be drawn into such relations with the
Italian models set before it as was at first attempted. Two currents,
therefore, were at once formed; and after the first encounter between
them, in which Castillejo was the most prominent, if not the earliest,
of those who strove to prevent their union, the respective streams have
continued to flow on, side by side, but still separate from each other,
down to our own days.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the influence of such poetry as
had filled the Cancioneros from the time of John the Second was still
acknowledged, and Bibero Costana, Heredia, Sanchez de Badajoz, and
their contemporaries, continued to be read, though they no longer
enjoyed the fashionable admiration which had once waited on them. But
the change that was destined to overthrow the school to which these
poets belonged was rapidly advancing; and if it were not the most
favorable that could have been made in Spanish lyric poetry, it was one
which, as we have seen, the brilliant success of Garcilasso, and the
circumstances producing and attending it, rendered inevitable.[839]
[839] See what is said in Chap. III. on Acuña, Cetina, Silvestre,
etc.
Among those who contributed avowedly to this change was Cantorál, who,
in 1578, published a volume of verse, in the Preface to which he does
not hesitate to say that Spain had hardly produced a poet deserving
the name, except Garcilasso;--a poet, as he truly adds, formed on
Italian models, and one whose footsteps he himself follows, though at
a very humble distance.[840] Another of the lyric poets of the same
period, and one who, with better success, took the same direction, was
Francisco de Figueroa, a gentleman and a soldier, whose few Castilian
poems are still acknowledged in the more choice collections of his
native literature, but who lived so long in Italy, and devoted himself
so earnestly to the study of its language, that he wrote Italian verse
with purity, as well as Spanish.[841] To these should be added Vicente
Espinel, who invented the _décimas_, or renewed the use of them, and
who, in a volume of poetry printed in 1591, distinguishes the Italian
forms, to which he gives precedence, from the Castilian, in which his
efforts, though fewer in number, are occasionally more beautiful than
any thing he wrote in the forms he preferred.[842]
[840] “Obras Poéticas de Lomas de Cantorál,” Madrid, 1578, 12mo.
It opens with a translation from Tansillo, and the lyrical
portions of the three books into which it is divided are in the
Italian manner; but the rest is often more national in its forms.
[841] Figueroa, (born 1540, died 1620), often called El Divino,
was perhaps more known and admired in Italy, during the greater
part of his life, than he was in Spain; but he died at last,
much honored, in Alcalá, his native city. His poetry is dated in
1572, and was circulated in manuscript quite as early as that
date implies; but it was not printed, I think, till it appeared
in 1626, at Lisbon, in a minute volume under the auspices of Luis
Tribaldo de Toledo, chronicler of Portugal. It is also in the
twentieth volume of the collection of Fernandez, Madrid. But,
though it is highly polished, it is not inspired by a masculine
genius.
[842] “Diversas Rimas de V. Espinel,” Madrid, 1591, 18mo. His
lines on Seeking Occasions for Jealousy (f. 78) are very happy,
and his Complaints against Past Happiness (f. 128) are better
than those on the same subject by Silvestre, Obras, 1599, f. 71.
But the disposition to follow the great masters of Italy was by no
means so general as the examples of Cantorál, Figueroa, and Espinel
might seem to imply. Their cases are, in fact, extreme cases, as we can
see from the circumstance, that, though Montemayor in his “Diana” was
a professed imitator of Sannazaro, still, among the poems scattered
through that prose pastoral, and in a volume which he afterwards
printed, are found many pieces--and some of them among the best he has
left--that belong decidedly to the older and more national school.[843]
Similar remarks may be applied to other authors of the same period.
Luis Barahona de Soto, of whose lyric poems only a few have reached us,
was by no means exclusively of the Italian school, though his principal
work, the famous “Tears of Angelica,” is in the manner of Ariosto.[844]
And Rufo, while he strove to tread in the footsteps of Petrarch, had
yet within him a Castilian genius, which seems to have compelled him,
as if against his will, to return to the paths of the elder poets of
his own country.[845] A still larger number of the contemporary lyrics
of Damian de Vegas[846] and Pedro de Padilla[847] are national in their
tone; but best of all is this tone heard, at this period, from Lopez
Maldonado, who, sometimes in a gay spirit, and sometimes in one full of
tenderness and melancholy, is almost uniformly inspired by the popular
feeling and true to the popular instincts.[848]
[843] Montemayor, as we shall see hereafter, introduced the prose
pastorals, in imitation of Sannazaro, into Spanish in 1542; and a
collection of his poetry, called a “Cancionero,” was printed in
1554. In the edition of Madrid, 1588, 12mo, which I use, about
one third of the volume is in the Castilian measures and manner;
after which it is formally announced, “Here begin the sonnets,
_canciones_, and other pieces in the measures of Italian verse.”
A _cancion_ occurs in the first book of the “Diana,” on the
regrets of a shepherdess who had driven her lover to despair,
which is very sweet and natural, and is well translated by old
Bartholomew Yong in his version of the Diana (London, 1598,
folio, p. 8). Polo, who continued the Diana, pursued the same
course in the poems he inserted in his continuation, and good
translations of several of them may be found in Yong.
“The works of Montemayor touching on Devotion and
Religion”--those, I presume, in his “Cancionero”--are prohibited
in the Index of 1667, and in that of 1790.
[844] The lyric poetry of Barahona de Soto is to be sought among
the works of Silvestre, 1599, and in the “Flores de Poetas
Ilustres,” by Espinosa, Valladolid, 1605, 4to.
[845] “Las Seyscientas Apotegmas de Juan Rufo, y otras Obras
en Verso,” Toledo, 1596, 8vo. The _Apotegmas_ are, in fact,
anecdotes in prose. His sonnets and _canciones_ are not so good
as his Letter to his Son and his other more Castilian poems, such
as the one relating to the war in Flanders, where he served.
[846] “Libro de Poesía, por Fray Damian de Vegas,” Toledo, 1590,
12mo, above a thousand pages; most of it religious; most of it in
the old manner; and nearly all of it very dull.
[847] “Pedro de Padilla, Eglogas, Sonetos,” etc., Sevilla, 1582,
4to, ff. 246. There are many lyrics in this collection, _glosas_,
_villancicos_, and _letrillas_, that are quite Castilian, some of
them spirited and pleasant. Others may be found in his “Thesoro
de Varias Poesías,” (Madrid, 1587, 12mo), where, however, there
are yet more in the Italian forms.
[848] The “Cancionero” of Maldonado was printed at Madrid, 1586,
in 4to, and the best parts of it are the amatory poetry, some
of which is found in the third volume of Faber’s “Floresta.”
One more poet might have been added here, as writing in the old
measures,--Joachim Romero de Çepeda,--whose works were printed
at Seville, 1582, in 4to, and contain a good many _canciones_,
_motes_, and _glosas_; among the rest, three remarkable sonnets,
presented by him to Philip II. as he passed through Badajoz,
where Çepeda lived, to take possession of Portugal, in 1580. But
the whole volume is marked with conceits and quibbles.
But it should not be forgotten that during the same period lived the
two greatest lyrical poets that Spain has ever produced,--exercising
little influence over each other, and still less over their own times.
Of one of them, Luis de Leon, who died in 1591, after having given
hardly any thing of his poetry to the world, we have already spoken.
The other was Fernando de Herrera, an ecclesiastic of Seville,[849] of
whom we know only that he lived in the latter part of the sixteenth
century; that he died in 1597, at the age of sixty-three years; that
Cervantes wrote a sonnet in his honor;[850] and that, in 1619, his
friend Francisco Pacheco, the painter, published his works, with a
Preface by the kindred spirit of Rioja.[851]
[849] Herrera’s praises of Seville and the Guadalquivir
sufficiently betray his origin, so constant are they. They are,
too, sometimes among the happy specimens of his verse; for
instance, in the ode in honor of St. Ferdinand, who rescued
Seville from the Moors, and in the elegy, “Bien debes asconder
sereno cielo.”
[850] Navarrete, Vida de Cervantes, 1819, p. 447. The date of
Herrera’s death is given on the sure authority of some MS. notes
of Pacheco, his friend, published in the Semanario Pintoresco,
1845, p. 299; before which it was unknown. These notes are
taken from an interesting MS. which seems to have been the
rough and imperfect draft of the “Imágines” and “Elogia Virorum
Illustrium,” which Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. I. p. 456) says
Pacheco gave to the well-known Count Duke Olivares. They are in
the Semanario Erudito, 1844, pp. 374, etc. See also Navarrete,
Vida de Cervantes, pp. 536-537. Pacheco was a good painter, and
Cean Bermudez (Diccionario, Tom. IV. p. 3) gives a life of him.
He was a man of some learning, and entered into a controversy
with Quevedo on the question of making Santa Teresa a copatroness
of Spain with Santiago, which Quevedo resisted; besides which,
in 1649, he published in 4to, at Seville, his “Arte de la
Pintura, su Antiguedad y Grandezas,” a rare work, praised by
Cean Bermudez, which I have never seen. Pacheco died in 1654.
Sedano (Parnaso Español, Tom. III. p. 117, and Tom. VII. p. 92)
gives two epigrams of Pacheco, which are connected with his art,
and which Sedano praises, I think, more than they deserve to be
praised.
[851] Pacheco’s edition is accompanied with a fine portrait of
the author from a picture by the editor, which has often been
engraved since.
That Herrera was acquainted with some of the unpublished poetry of
Luis de Leon is certain, because he cites it in his learned commentary
on Garcilasso, printed in 1580; but that he placed Garcilasso de la
Vega above Luis de Leon is no less certain from the same commentary,
where he often expresses an opinion that Garcilasso was the greatest of
all Spanish poets;[852]--an opinion sufficiently obvious in the volume
of his own poetry published by himself in 1582, which is altogether in
the Italian manner adopted by Garcilasso, and which, increased by poems
of a different character in the editions of Pacheco, in 1619, and of
Fernandez, in 1808,[853] constitutes all we possess of Herrera’s verse,
though certainly not all he wrote.[854]
[852] “In our Spain, beyond all comparison, Garcilasso stands
first,” he says, (p. 409), and repeats the same opinion often
elsewhere.
[853] The edition of Fernandez, the most complete of all, and
twice printed, is in the fourth and fifth volumes of his “Poesías
Castellanas.” The longer poems of Herrera, which we know only by
their unpromising titles, are “The Battle of the Giants,” “The
Rape of Proserpine,” “The Amadis,” and “The Loves of Laurino
and Cærona.” Perhaps we have reason to regret the loss of his
unpublished Eclogues and “Castilian Verses,” which last may
have been in the old Castilian measures. In 1572, he published
a descriptive account of the war of Cyprus and the battle of
Lepanto, and, in 1592, a Life of Sir Thomas More, taken from the
Latin “Lives of the Three Thomases,” by Stapleton, the obnoxious
English Papist. (Wood’s Athenæ, ed. Bliss, Tom. I. p. 671.) A
History of Spain, said by Rioja to have been finished by Herrera
about 1590, is probably lost.
[854] In some remarks by the Licentiate Enrique de Duarte,
prefixed to the edition of Herrera’s poetry printed in 1619, he
says, that, a few days after Herrera’s death, a bound volume,
containing all his poetical works, prepared by himself for
the press, was destroyed, and that his scattered manuscripts
would probably have shared the same fate, if they had not been
carefully collected by Pacheco.
Some parts of the volume published by himself have little value, such
as most of the sonnets,--a form of composition on which he placed an
extravagant estimate.[855] Other parts are excellent. Such are his
elegies, which are in _terza rima_, and of which the one addressed
to Love beseeching Repose is full of passion, while that in which
he expresses his gratitude for the resource of tears is full of
tenderness and the gentlest harmony.[856] But his principal success is
in his _canzones_. Of these he wrote sixteen. The least fortunate of
them is, perhaps, the one where he most strove to imitate Pindar;--that
on the rebellion of the Moors in the Alpuxarras, which he has rendered
cold by founding it on the Greek mythology. The best are one on the
battle of Lepanto, gained by Herrera’s favorite hero, the young and
generous Don John of Austria, and one on the overthrow of Sebastian
of Portugal, in his disastrous invasion of Africa. Both were probably
written when the minds of men were everywhere stirred by the great
events that called them forth; and both were fortunately connected with
those feelings of loyalty and religion that always seemed to spring up
together in the minds of the Spanish people, and to be of kindred with
all their highest poetical inspirations.
[855] In his commentary on Garcilasso he says, “The sonnet is the
most beautiful form of composition in Spanish and Italian poetry,
and the one that demands the most art in its construction and the
greatest grace.” p. 66.
[856] The lady to whom Herrera dedicated his love, in a spirit of
pure and Platonic affection, little known to Spanish poetry, is
said to have been the Countess of Gelves.
The first--that on the battle of Lepanto, which emancipated many
thousand Christian captives, and stopped the second westward advance
of the Crescent--is a lofty and cheerful hymn of victory, mingling,
to a remarkable degree, the jubilant exultation which breaks forth
in the Psalms and Prophecies on the conquests of the Jews over their
unbelieving enemies, with the feelings of a devout Spaniard at the
thought of so decisive an overthrow of the ancient and hated enemy of
his faith and country. The other,--an ode on the death of Sebastian
of Portugal,--composed, on the contrary, in a vein of despondency,
is still romantic and striking, even more, perhaps, than its rival.
That unfortunate monarch, who was one of the most chivalrous princes
that ever sat on a throne in Christendom, undertook, in 1578, to
follow up the great victory of Lepanto by rescuing the whole of the
North of Africa from the Moslem yoke, under which it had so long
groaned, and to restore to their homes the multitudes of Christians
who were there suffering the most cruel servitude. He perished in the
generous attempt; hardly fifty of his large army returning to recount
the details of the fatal battle, in which he himself had disappeared
among the heaps of unrecognized slain. But so fond and fervent was
the popular admiration, that, for above a century afterwards, it was
believed in Portugal that Don Sebastian would still return and resume
the power which, for a time, had so dazzled and deluded the hearts of
his subjects.[857]
[857] There is a book on this subject which should not be
entirely overlooked in a history of Spanish literature. It is an
account of a pastry-cook of Madrigal, who, seventeen years after
the rout in Africa, passed himself off in Spain as Don Sebastian,
and induced Anna of Austria, a cousin of that monarch and a nun,
to give him rich jewels, which led to the detection of the fraud.
The story is interesting and well told, and was first printed
in 1595, at Cadiz, under the title of “A History of Gabriel de
Espinosa, the Pastry-cook of Madrigal, who pretended to be King
Don Sebastian of Portugal.” Of course, Philip II. did not deal
gently with one who made such pretensions to the crown he himself
had clutched, or with any of his abettors. The pastry-cook and
a monk on whom he had imposed his fictions were both hanged,
after undergoing the usual appliances of racks and tortures; and
the poor princess was degraded from her rank, and shut up in a
conventual cell for life. There is an anonymous play of small
merit, which seems to have been written in the time of Philip
IV., and is entitled “El Pastelero de Madrigal.”
To the main facts in this melancholy disaster Herrera has happily given
a religious turn. He opens his ode with a lament for the affliction of
Portugal, and then goes on to show that the generous glory which should
have accompanied such an effort against the common enemy of Christendom
had been lost in a cruel defeat, because those who undertook the great
expedition had been moved only by human ambition, forgetting the higher
Christian feelings that should have carried them into a war against
the infidel. In this spirit, he cries out,--
But woe to them who, trusting in the strength
Of horses and their chariots’ multitude,
Have hastened, Lybia, to thy desert sands!--
O, woe to them! for theirs is not a hope
That humbly seeks for everlasting light,
But a presumptuous pride, that claims beforehand
The uncertain victory, and ere their eyes
Have looked to Heaven for help, with confident
And hardened hearts divides the unwon spoils.
But He who holds the headstrong back from ruin,--
The God of Israel,--hath relaxed his hand,
And they have rushed--the chariot and the charioteer,
The horse and horseman--down the dread abyss
His anger has prepared for their presumption.[858]
[858]
Ai de los que passaron, confiados
En sus cavallos, y en la muchadumbre
De sus carros, en tí, Libia desierta!
Y en su vigor y fuerças engañados,
No alçaron su esperança á aquella cumbre
D’eterna luz; mas con sobervia cierta
S’ofrecieron la incierta
Victoria, y sin bolver á Dios sus ojos,
Con ierto cuello y coraçon ufano,
Solo atendieron siempre á los despojos!
Y el Santo de Israel abrió su mano,
Y los dexó;--y cayó en despeñadero
El carro, y el cavallo y cavallero.
Versos de Fern. Herrera, Sevilla, 1619, 4to, p. 350.
Complaints, not entirely without foundation, have been made against
Herrera’s poetry, on the ground that he wants a sufficiently
discriminating taste in the choice of his words. Quevedo, who, when he
printed the poems of the Bachiller de la Torre as models of purity in
style, first made this suggestion, intimates that his objections do not
apply to the volume of poetry published by Herrera himself, but to the
additions that were made to it after the author’s death by his friend
Pacheco.[859] But, without stopping to inquire whether this intimation
be strictly true or not, it is enough to say, that, when Herrera’s
taste was formed and forming, the Castilian was in the state in which
it was described to have been about 1540 by the wise author of the
“Dialogue on Languages”;--that is, it was not, in all respects, fitted
for the highest efforts of the more cultivated lyric poetry. Herrera
felt this difficulty, and somewhat boldly undertook to find a remedy
for it.
[859] See the address of Quevedo to his readers in the “Poesías
del Bachiller de la Torre.” Some of the words, however, to which
he objects, like _pensoso_, _infamia_, _dudanza_, etc., have been
recognized since as good Castilian, which from their nature they
were when Herrera used them.
The course he pursued is sufficiently pointed out in the acute,
but pedantic, notes which he has published to his edition of
Garcilasso.[860] He began by claiming the right to throw out of
the higher poetry all words that gave a common or familiar air to
the thought. He introduced and defended inversions and inflections
approaching those in the ancient classical languages. And he adopted,
and sometimes succeeded in naturalizing in the Castilian, words from
the Latin, the Italian, and the Greek. A moderate and cautious use of
means like these was, perhaps, desirable in his time, as the author of
the “Dialogue on Languages” had already endeavoured to show. But the
misfortune with Herrera was, that he carried his practice, if not his
doctrines, too far, and has thus occasionally given to his poetry a
stiff and formal air, and made it, not only too much an imitation of
the Latin or the Italian, but a slight anticipation of the false taste
of Góngora, that so soon became fashionable. This is particularly true
of his sonnets and _sestinas_, which are often involved and awkward in
their structure; but in his more solemn odes, and especially in those
where the stanzas are regular, each consisting of thirteen or more
lines, there is a “long-resounding march” and a grand lyric movement,
that sweep on their triumphant way in old Castilian dignity, quite
unconscious of a spirit of imitation, and quite beyond its reach.
[860] Obras de Garcilasso, 1580, pp. 75, 120, 126, 573, and other
places.
Perhaps a better idea of the lyric poetry in highest favor among the
more cultivated classes of Spanish society, at the end of the sixteenth
century and the beginning of the seventeenth, can be obtained from the
collection of Pedro Espinosa, entitled “Flowers from the Most Famous
Poets of Spain,” than from any other single volume, or from any single
author.[861] It was printed in 1605, and contains more or less of the
works of about sixty poets of that period, including Espinosa himself,
of whom we have sixteen pieces that are worthy of their place. Most of
the collection consists of lyric verse in the usual forms,--chiefly
Italian, but not unfrequently national,--and many of the writers are
familiar to us. Among them are Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and others
already noticed, together with Góngora, the Argensolas, and some of
their contemporaries.
[861] “Primera Parte de las Flores de Poetas Ilustres de España,
ordenada por Pedro Espinosa, Natural de la Ciudad de Antequera,”
Valladolid, 1605, 4to, ff. 204. Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p.
190) says Espinosa was attached to the great Andalusian family
of the Dukes of Medina-Sidonia, the Guzmans, and of the three
or four works he produced, two are in honor of his patrons, and
one was published by himself as late as 1644. Much of the poetry
in the “Flores” is Andalusian,--a circumstance that renders the
omission of Herrera the more striking; some of it is to be found
nowhere else; and, unhappily, the book itself is among the rarest
in Spanish poetry.
Several of the poets from whom it gives selections or contributions
are to be found nowhere else,--such as two ladies named Narvaez, and
another called Doña Christovalina; while, from time to time, we find
poems by obscure authors, like those of Pedro de Liñan and Agustin de
Texada Paez, which, from their considerable merit, it would have been
a misfortune to lose.[862] But Fernando de Herrera does not appear
there at all; and of more than two thirds of its authors, only one
or two short pieces are given. It is to be regarded, therefore, as an
exhibition of the taste of the age when it appeared, rather than as a
selection of what was really best and highest in the older and more
recent Spanish lyric poetry at the opening of the seventeenth century.
But, whatever we may think of it in this point of view, it is certainly
among the more curious materials for a history of that poetry; and
before we condemn Espinosa for selecting less wisely than he might have
done, we should remember, that, after all, his taste was probably more
refined than that of his age, since a second part of his collection
which he proposed to publish was not called for, though he continued to
be known as an author many years after the appearance of the first.
[862] Of the ladies whose poems occur in Espinosa, I think one,
Doña Christovalina, is noticed by Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. II.
p. 349). Of the others I know nothing, nor of Pedro de Liñan.
Texada, as we are told by Antonio, died in 1635, at the age of
sixty-seven;--the five poems printed thirty years before by
Espinosa being all we have of his works.
But Herrera is not the only lyrical poet of the period who does not
appear in Espinosa’s collection. Rey de Artieda, whose sonnets are
among the best in the language,--Manoel de Portugal, whose numerous
religious poems are often in the national forms,--and Carrillo, a
soldier of promise, who died young, and who wrote sometimes with a
simplicity and freshness that never fail to be attractive,--are all
omitted; though their works, published at just about the same time with
the collection of Espinosa, had been known in manuscript long before,
as much as those of Luis de Leon and Góngora.[863]
[863] Andres Rey de Artieda, better known under his academical
name of Artemidoro, is praised by Cervantes as a well-known poet
in 1584, though his works were not printed till they appeared
at Çaragoça, 1605, 4to. (Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 262.) Manoel de
Portugal, one of those Portuguese who, in the time of Philip
II. and III., sought favor of the oppressors of their country
by writing in Spanish, was known from 1577; but the collection
of his poems in nearly a thousand pages, some in Portuguese,
and all of little value, did not appear till it was printed at
Lisbon, 1605, 12mo, the year before his death. (Barbosa, Tom.
III. p. 345.) Luys de Carrillo y Sotomayor’s poems were published
after his death by his brother, at Madrid, 1611, 4to, and were
reprinted in 1613; but they had been circulated in MS. from the
time he was at the University of Salamanca, where he resided six
years. He died in 1610. Pellicer, Bib., Tom. II. p. 122.
Christóval de Mesa comes a little later. His lyric poems were printed
in 1611, and again, more amply, in 1618. He professes to have taken
Herrera for his master, or for one of his masters; but he was long in
Italy, where, as he tells us, he changed his style, and from this time,
at least, he belongs with absolute strictness to the school of Boscan
and Garcilasso.[864]
[864] “Rimas de Christóval de Mesa,” Madrid, 1611, 12mo; to which
add about fifty sonnets in the volume of his translation of
Virgil’s Eclogues, Madrid, 1618, 12mo. His notice of himself is
in a poetical epistle to the Count de Lemos, when he was going as
viceroy to Naples, (Rimas, f. 155), and is such as to show that
he was anxious to be a member of that poetical court, and much
disappointed at his failure.
Francisco de Ocaña and Lope de Sosa, on the contrary, are as strictly
of the old Spanish school. The reason may be that their poetry is
almost all religious,--such as is found among the sacred verses of
Silvestre and Castillejo in the preceding century,--and that they wrote
for popular effect, seeking to connect themselves with feelings that
had grown old in the hearts of the multitude. The little hymns of the
former, on the Approach of the Madonna to Bethlehem, vainly asking for
Shelter, and one by the latter, on the Love and Grief of a Penitent
Soul, are specimens of what is best in this peculiar style of Spanish
poetry, which, marked as it is with some rudeness, carries back our
thoughts to the spirited old _villancicos_ in which it originated.[865]
[865] The poetry of both of them was printed in 1603; but I do
not find any mention of the exact time when either of them lived,
and am not quite certain that Lope de Sosa is not the poet who
occurs often in the old Cancioneros. I might have added to the
notice of their poetry that of some of the poetry in an ascetic
work by Malon de Chaide, called “La Conversion de la Magdalena,”
consisting of sonnets, versions of the Psalms, etc., which are
very pleasing. The best, however,--an ode on the love of Mary
Magdalen to the Saviour after his resurrection,--is so grossly
amatory in its tone, that its poetical merit is quite dimmed by
it. Ed. Alcalá, 1592, 12mo, f. 336.
Alonso de Ledesma, of Segovia, who was born in 1552, and died in
1623, wrote, or rather attempted to write, in the same style, but
failed; though he succeeded in what may be regarded as a corruption of
it. His “Spiritual Conceits,” as he called a volume which was first
printed in 1600, and which afterwards appeared six times during its
author’s life, are so full of quaintnesses and exaggerations as to
take from them nearly all poetical merit. They are religious, and owed
their success partly to the preservation of the old familiar forms
and tones, but more to the perverse ingenuity with which they abound,
and which they contributed much to make fashionable. Indeed, at that
time, and very much under the leading influence of Ledesma, there was
a well-known party in Spanish literature called the “Conceptistas”;--a
sect composed, in a considerable degree, of mystics, who expressed
themselves in metaphors and puns, alike in the pulpit and in poetry,
and whose influence was so extensive, that traces of it may be found
in many of the principal writers of the time, including Quevedo and
Lope de Vega. Of this school of the Conceptistas, though Quevedo was
the more brilliant master, Ledesma was the original head. His “Monstruo
Imaginado,” or Fanciful Monster, first printed in 1615, is little
else than a series of allegories hidden under the quibbles that are
heaped upon them; beginning with ballads, and ending with the short
prose fiction that gives its name to the volume. Several of the poems
it contains are on the death of Philip the Second, and sound very
strangely, from the irreverence with which that important event is
treated, both in its political and its religious aspects. Others, which
are on secular subjects, are in a tone even more free. But the little
he has left that is worth reading is to be sought in his “Spiritual
Conceits,” where there are a few sonnets and a few lyrical ballads
that are not likely to be forgotten.[866]
[866] Sedano, Parnaso Español, Tom. V. p. xxxi. Lope de Vega
praises Ledesma more than once, unreasonably. His “Conceptos,” in
the first edition, Madrid, 1600, is a small volume of 258 leaves,
but I believe the subsequent editions contain more poems. His
“Juegos de la Noche Buena,” Barcelona, 1611, which I have never
seen, is strictly forbidden by the Index Expurgatorius of 1667,
p. 64.
But there was a more formidable party in Spanish literature than that
of the Conceptistas; one that arose about the same time, and prevailed
longer and more injuriously. It was that of the “Cultos”; or the
writers who claimed for themselves a peculiarly elegant and cultivated
style of composition, and who, while endeavouring to justify their
claims, ran into the most ridiculous extravagances, pedantry, and
affectations.
That such follies should thrive more in Spain than elsewhere was
natural. The broadest and truest paths to intellectual distinction
were there closed; and it was not remarkable, therefore, that men
should wander into by-ways and obscure recesses. They were forbidden
to struggle honestly and openly for truth, and pleased themselves
with brilliant follies that were at least free from moral mischiefs.
Despotic governments have sometimes sought to amuse an oppressed
multitude with holiday shows of rope-dancers and fireworks. Neither the
ministers of Philip the Third and Philip the Fourth nor the Inquisition
particularly patronized the false style of writing that prevailed
in their time, and served to amuse the better educated portions
of society. But they tolerated it; and that was enough. It became
fashionable at court immediately, and in time struck such root in the
soil of the whole country, and so flourished there, that it has not yet
been completely eradicated.[867]
[867] Moro Expósito, Paris, 1834, 8vo, Tom. I. p. xvii.
It was not, however, in Spain alone that such follies were known.
From the middle of the fifteenth century, when a knowledge of the
great masters of antiquity had become, for the first time, common
among scholars throughout the West, efforts had been made to build
up and cultivate a style of writing not unworthy of their example in
the languages of the principal countries of Europe. Some of these
efforts were wisely made, and resulted in the production of a series
of authors that now constitute the recognized poets and prose-writers
of Christendom, and emulate the models on which they were more or less
formed. Others, misled by pedantry and an unsound judgment, have long
since fallen into oblivion. But the period when such efforts were
made with the least taste and discretion was the latter part of the
sixteenth century and the beginning of the seventeenth; the period when
the Pleiades, as they were called, prevailed in France, the Euphuists
in England, and the Marinisti in Italy.
How far the bad taste that was fashionable for a time in these several
countries had an effect on the contemporary tendencies of a similar
kind in Spain cannot be exactly determined. Probably what was the
favored literature of London or Paris was little known at Madrid, and
less cared for. But that whatever was done in Italy was immediately
carried to Spain, in the times of Philip the Second and Philip the
Third, we have abundant proof.[868]
[868] It is a striking and important fact, to be taken in this
connection, that Lope de Vega, though opposed to the new school
upon principle, was a correspondent and admirer of Marini, to
whom he sent his portrait and dedicated a play; and of whom, in
the extravagance of his flattery, he said that Tasso was but
as a dawn to the full glory of Marini. Through this channel,
therefore, and through many others, traces of which may be found
in the collection of Italian eulogies on Lope de Vega, we can
at once see how Marini may easily have exercised an influence
over the poets of Spain contemporary with him. See Lope’s
“Jardin,” (Obras, Tom. I. p. 486), first printed in 1622, and
his Dedication to “Virtud, Pobreza y Mujer” (Comedias, Tom. XX.,
Madrid, 1629, f. 203).
Of the influence of classical antiquity in corrupting the proper
Castilian style, I know of no instance earlier than that of Vasco
Diaz de Frexenal, who published as early as 1547. His object
seems to have been to introduce Latin words and constructions,
just as the Pleiades did in France, at the same time and a little
later. This can be seen in his “Veinte Triunfos,” chiefly devoted
to a poetical account of events in the life of Charles V.; such
as his marriage, the birth of his son Philip II., his coronation
at Bologna, etc.,--all written in the old measures, and published
without notice of the place or year, but, necessarily, after
1530, since that was the date of the Emperor’s coronation. Thus,
in the “Prohemio,” where he speaks of dedicating his “Twenty
Triumphs” to the twenty Spanish Dukes, Frexenal says, “Baste que
la ferventisima afeccion, y la observantisima veneracion, que á
vuestras dignisimas y felicisimas Señorias devo, á la dedicacion
de mis veinte triunphos me han convidado. Como quiera que mas
coronas ducales segun mi noticia en la indomita España no hay,
verdaderamente el presente es de poco precio, y las obras del de
menos valor, y el autor dellas de menos estima. Pero su apetitosa
observancia, su afeccionada fidelidad, y su optativa servidumbre,
por las nobilisimas bondades, y prestantisimas virtudes de
vuestras excelentes y dignisimas Señorias en algun precio
estimadas ser merecen.”
He Latinizes less in the poems that follow, because it is more
difficult to do it in verse, but not because he desires it less,
as the following lines from the “Triumpho Nuptial Vandalico” (f.
ix.) prove plainly:--
Al tiempo que el fulminado
Apolo muy radial
Entrava en el primer grado,
Do nasció el vello dorado
En el equinocial;
Pasado el puerto final
De la hesperica nacion,
Su machina mundanal,
Por el curso occidental
Equitando en Phelegon.
This is very different from what was attempted by Juan de Mena
a century before; he having desired only to take individual
Latin words, and knowing little of classical antiquity; whereas
Frexenal wishes, in Montaigne’s phrase, “to Latinize,” and give
to his Castilian sentences a Roman air and construction, and so
may have been, to a certain extent, the predecessor of Góngora.
Antonio mentions two or three other works of Frexenal in prose,
chiefly religious, which I have never seen; but I have some
ridiculous verses, printed at the end of his treatise entitled
“Jardin del Alma Christiana,” 1552, 4to.
The poet who introduced “the cultivated style” into Spanish literature,
and whose name that style has ever since worn, was Luis de Góngora,
a gentleman of Córdova, who was born in 1561, and was educated at
Salamanca, where it was intended he should qualify himself for the
profession of the law, of which his father was a distinguished
ornament. But it was too late. The young man’s disposition for poetry
was already developed, and the only permanent result of his studies at
the University is to be sought in a large number of ballads and other
slight compositions, often filled with bitter satire, but written with
simplicity and spirit.
In 1584 he is noticed by Cervantes as a known author.[869] He was
then only twenty-three years old; but he continued to live in his
native city, poor and unpatronized, yet twenty years longer, when,
to insure a decent subsistence for his old age, he took the tonsure
and became a priest. About the same time, he resorted to the court,
then at Valladolid, and was there in 1605, the year in which Espinosa
published his collection of poetry, to which Góngora was the largest
contributor.[870] But he was not more favored at court than he had been
at Córdova; and, after waiting and watching eleven years, we do not
find that he had obtained any thing more than a titular chaplaincy to
the king, a pleasant note from the patronizing Count de Lemos,[871]
the good-natured favor of the Duke de Lerma and the Marquis de Siete
Iglesias, and the general reputation of being a wit and a poet. At
last he was noticed by the all-powerful favorite, the Count Duke
Olivares, and seemed on the point of obtaining the fortune for which
he had waited so long. But at this moment his health failed. He
returned, languishing, to his native city, and died there in peace soon
afterwards, at the age of sixty-six.[872]
[869] Galatea, ed. 1784, Tom. II. p. 284.
[870] Pellicer, Vida de Cervantes, in Don Quixote, Tom. I. p.
cxiv.
[871] Mayans y Siscar, Cartas, Tom. I. p. 125.
[872] See his life, by his friend Hozes, prefixed to his Works,
Madrid, 1654, 4to.
Much of the early poetry of Góngora is in short lines, and remarkable
for its simplicity. One of his lyrical ballads, beginning,--
The loveliest maiden
Our village has known,
Only yesterday wed,
To-day, widowed, alone,[873]--
[873]
La mas bella niña
De nuestro lugar;
Oy viuda, y sola,
Y ayer por casar.
Obras de Góngora, 1654, f. 84.
contains an admirably natural expression of grief, by a young bride to
her mother, on the occasion of her husband’s being suddenly called to
the wars. Another yet more lyrical, which begins,--
Ye fresh and soft breezes,
That now for the spring
Unfold your bright garlands,
Sweet violets bring,[874]--
[874]
Frescos ayrecillos,
Que á la primauera
Destexeis guirnaldas,
Y esparceis violetas.
Obras de Góngora, 1654. f. 89.
is, again, full of gentle tenderness. And so are some of his religious
popular poems, which occasionally approach the character of the old
_villancicos_.
His odes of the same period are more stately. That on the Armada,
which must have been written as early as 1588, since it contains the
most confident predictions of a victory over England, is one of the
best; and that on Saint Hermenegild--a prince, who, in the sixth
century, partly for his resistance to Arianism and partly for political
rebellion, was put to death by his own father, and afterwards canonized
by the Church of Rome--is full of fervor and of the spirit of Catholic
devotion. Both are among the good specimens of the more formal Spanish
ode.
But this poetry, all of which seems to have been written before he went
to court, and while he lived neglected at Córdova, failed to give him
the honors to which he aspired. It failed even to give him the means
of living. Moved, perhaps, by these circumstances, and perhaps by the
success of Ledesma and his conceited school, Góngora adopted another
style, and one that he thought more likely to command attention.
The most obvious feature in this style is, that it consists almost
entirely of metaphors, so heaped one upon another, that it is sometimes
as difficult to find out the meaning hidden under their grotesque mass
as if it were absolutely a series of confused riddles. Thus, when
his friend Luis de Bavia, in 1613, published a volume containing the
history of three Popes, Góngora sent him the following words, thrown
into the shape of a commendatory sonnet, to be prefixed to the book:--
“This poem, which Bavia has now offered to the world, if not tied up
in numbers, yet is filed down into a good arrangement, and licked into
shape by learning, is a cultivated history, whose gray-headed style,
though not metrical, is well combed, and robs three pilots of the
sacred bark from time and rescues them from oblivion. But the pen that
thus immortalizes the heavenly turnkeys on the bronze of its history is
not a pen, but the key of ages. It opens to their names, not the gates
of failing memory, which stamps shadows on masses of foam, but the
gates of immortality.”
The meaning of this, as it is set forth in ten pages of commentary by
one of his admirers, is as follows:--
“The history which Bavia now offers to the world is not, indeed, in
verse, but it is written and finished in the spirit of wise learning
and of poetry. Immortalizing three Popes, it becomes the key of ages,
opening to them, not the gates of memory, which often give passage
to a transient and false fame, but the gates of sure and perpetual
renown.”[875]
[875] A la Tercera Parte de la Historia Pontifical, que escriuió
el Doctor Bavia, Capellan de la Capilla Real de Granada.
Este que Bavia al mundo oy ha ofrecido
Poema, si no á numeros atado,
De la disposicion antes limado,
Y de la erudicion despues lamido,
Historia es culta, cuyo encanecido
Estilo, sino metrico, peinado,
Tres ya Pilotos del vagel sagrado
Hurta al tiempo, y redime del oluido.
Pluma, pues, que claueros celestiales
Eterniza en los bronces du su historia,
Llaue es ya de los siglos, y no pluma.
Ella á sus nombres puertas immortales
Abre, no de caduca no memoria,
Que sombras sella en tumulos de espuma.
Góngora, Obras, 1654, f. 5.
The commentary is in Coronel, Obras de Góngora Comentadas, Tom.
II. Parte I., Madrid, 1645, pp. 148-159; but it should be noted,
that the concluding lines are so obscure, that Luzan (Poética,
Lib. II. c. 15) gives them a different interpretation, and
understands the phrase, “stamping shadows on masses of foam,”
to refer to the art of printing, which so often praises those
who do not deserve it. The whole sonnet is cited with admiration
by Gracian, “Agudeza y Arte de Ingenio,” Discurso XXXII.; a
work which we must mention hereafter as the art of poetry for
the _culto_ school; and the editors of the “Diario de los
Literatos de España”--men of better taste than was common in
their times--reproached Luzan, when they reviewed his “Poética”
in 1738, with being too severe on this extraordinary nonsense.
Lanuza, Discurso Apologético de Luzan, Pamplona, 1740, 12mo, pp.
46-78.
The extravagance of the metaphors used by Góngora was often as
remarkable as their confusion and obscurity. Thus, when, in 1619,
just after the appearance of two comets, one of his friends proposed
to accompany Philip the Third to Lisbon,--a city founded, according
to tradition, by Ulysses,--Góngora wrote to him, “Wilt thou, in a
year when a plural comet cuts out mourning of evil augury to crowns,
tread in the footsteps of the wily Greek?“[876] And again, in his
first “Solitude,” speaking of a lady whom he admired, he calls her “a
maiden so beautiful, that she might parch up Norway with her two suns
and bleach Ethiopia with her two hands.” But though these are extreme
cases, it is not to be denied that the later poems of Góngora are often
made unintelligible by similar extravagances.[877]
[876] Obras, f. 32.
[877] In the second _coro_.
He did not, however, stop here. He introduced new words into his
verse, chiefly taken from the ancient classical languages; he used old
Castilian words in new and forced meanings; and he adopted involved and
unnatural constructions, quite foreign from the genius of the Spanish.
The consequence was, that his poetry, though not without brilliancy,
soon became unintelligible. This is the case with one or two of his
sonnets, printed as early as 1605;[878] and still more with his longer
poems, such as his “Solitudes,” or Deserts, his “Polyphemus,” his
“Panegyric on the Duke of Lerma,” and his “Pyramus and Thisbe”; none of
which appeared till after his death.
[878] I suppose he changed his style about the time he went to
court; and the very first of his sonnets in Espinosa’s “Flores”
is proof that he had changed it as early as 1605.
Commentaries, therefore, were necessary to explain them, even while
they still circulated only in manuscript. The earliest were prepared,
at his own request, by Pellicer, a scholar of much reputation, who
published them in 1630, under the title of “Solemn Discourses on the
Works of Don Luis de Góngora,” expressing, at the same time, his fears
that he might sometimes have failed to detect the meaning of what
was often really so obscure.[879] They were followed, in 1636, by a
defence and explanation of the “Pyramus and Thisbe,” from Salazar
Mardones.[880] And between that year and 1646, the series was closed
with an elaborate commentary of above fifteen hundred pages, by
Garcia de Salcedo Coronel, himself a poet.[881] To these were added
contemporary discussions, by Juan Francisco de Amaya, a jurist; by
Martin Angulo, in reply to an attack of Cascales, the rhetorician;
and by others, until the amount of the notes on Góngora’s poetry
was tenfold greater than that of the text they were intended to
elucidate.[882]
[879] Jos. Pellicer, in his “Lecciones Solemnes,” (Madrid,
1630, 4to, col. 610-612 and 684), explains his position in
relation to Góngora, and his trouble about finding the meaning
of some passages in his works; thus justifying what the Prince
of Esquilache said, probably in reference to these very
commentaries:--
Un docto comentador
(El mas presumido digo)
Es el mayor enemigo
Que tener pudo el autor.
El Príncipe á su Libro.
[880] “Ilustracion y Defensa de la Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe de
Christóval de Salazar Mardones,” Madrid, 1636, 4to.
[881] There is a notice of Coronel in Antonio, Bib. Nova. The
three volumes of his commentary (Madrid, 4to, 1636-46) contain
six or seven hundred pages each;--the second being divided into
two parts. As a poet himself, he printed in Madrid, 1650, 4to, a
volume which he called “Crystals from Helicon,” one of the worst
productions of the school of Góngora.
[882] Antonio, article “Ludovicus de Góngora,” mentions the
inferior commentators. The attack of Cascales, who seems afraid
to be thorough with it, is in his “Cartas Philológicas.”
Followers, of course, would not be wanting to one who was so famous.
Of these, the most distinguished in rank, and perhaps in merit, was
the Count of Villamediana,--the same unfortunate nobleman whose very
bold and public assassination was attributed to the jealousy of Philip
the Third, and created a sensation, at the time it happened, in all
the courts of Europe. He was a man of wit and fashion, whose poetry
was a part of his pretensions as a courtier, and was not printed till
1629, eight years after his death. Some of it is written without
affectation,--probably the earlier portions; but, in general, both
by the choice of his subjects,--such as those of Phaeton, of Daphne,
and of Europa,--and by his mode of treating them, he bears witness to
his imitation of the worst parts of Góngora’s works. His sonnets, of
which there are two or three hundred, are in every style, satirical,
religious, and sentimental; and a few of his miscellaneous poems have
something of the older national air and tone. But he is rarely more
intelligible than his master, and never shows his master’s talent.[883]
[883] The queen, who was a daughter of Henry IV. of France, was
one day passing through a gallery of the palace, when some one
came behind her and covered her eyes with his hands. “What is
that for, Count?” she exclaimed. But, unhappily for her, it was
not the Count;--it was the king. Soon afterwards Villamediana
received a hint to be on his guard, as his life was in danger.
He neglected the friendly notice, and was assassinated the same
evening. He had been very open in his admiration of the queen,
having, on occasion of a tournament, covered his person with
silver _reals_ and taken the punning motto,--“Mis amores son
_reales_.” (Velazquez, Dieze, Göttingen, 1796, 8vo, p. 255.) An
edition of his Works, Madrid, 1634, 4to, is a little more ample
than that of Çaragoça, 1629, 4to; but not the better for it. The
story of the Count’s unhappy presumption and fate may be found
in Mad. d’Aulnoy’s “Voyage d’Espagne,” ed. 1693, Tom. II. pp.
17-21, and in the striking ballads of the Duke of Rivas, Romances
Históricos, Paris, 1841, 8vo.
Another of those that favored and facilitated the success of the new
school was Paravicino, who died in 1633, and whose position as the
popular court preacher, during the last sixteen years of his life,
enabled him to introduce “the cultivated style” into the pulpit, and
help its currency among the higher classes of society. His poetical
works were not collected and published till 1641, when they appeared
under the imperfect disguise of a part of his family name,--Felix
de Arteaga. They fill a small volume, which abounds in sonnets, and
contains a single drama of no value. The best parts of it are the
lyrical ballads, which, though mystical and obscure, are not without
poetry; a remark that should be extended to the narrative ballad on the
Loves of Alfonso the Eighth and the Jewess of Toledo, which Arteaga
seems to have been willing to write in the older and simpler style.[884]
[884] Baena, Hijos de Madrid, Tom. II. p. 389. His entire name
was Hortensio Felix Paravicino y Arteaga. Why the whole of it
was not given with his poems, which were not printed till after
his death, it is not easy to tell. There are editions of them in
1641, 1645, and 1650; the last, Alcalá, 12mo.
These were the principal persons whose example gave currency to the new
style. Its success, however, depended, in a great degree, on the tone
of the higher class of society and the favor of the court, to which
they all belonged, and in which their works were generally circulated
in manuscript long before they were printed,--a practice always common
in Spain, from the rigorous supervision exercised over the press, and
the formidable obstacles thrown in the way of all who were concerned
in its management, whether as authors or as publishers. Fashion was,
no doubt, the great means of success for the followers of Góngora, and
it was able to push their influence very widely. The inferior poets,
almost without exception, bowed to it throughout the country. Roca y
Serna published, in 1623, a collection of poems, called “The Light of
the Soul,” which was often reprinted between that time and the end
of the century.[885] Antonio Lopez de Vega, neither a kinsman nor a
countryman of his great namesake, who, however, praises him much beyond
his merits, printed his “Perfect Gentleman” in 1620; a political dream,
to which he added a small collection of poems of a nature not more
substantial.[886]
[885] Ambrosio de la Roca y Serna was a Valencian, and died in
1649. (Ximeno, Tom. I. p. 359, and Fuster, Tom. I. p. 249.) He
seems to have been valued little, except as a religious poet, but
he was valued long. I have a copy of his “Luz del Alma,” without
year or place, but printed as late as 1725, 12mo.
[886] “El Perfeto Señor, Poesías Varias,” etc., Madrid, 1652,
4to. He wrote _silvas_ darker than Góngora’s “Soledades.” His
madrigals and shorter poems are more intelligible, though none
are good. He was a Portuguese by birth, but lived in Madrid,
where he died after 1656. (Barbosa, Tom. I. p. 310.) There are
two editions of his works.
Anastasio Pantaleon, a young cavalier, who enjoyed great consideration
at court, and was assassinated in the streets of Madrid, being mistaken
for another person, had his poems collected by the affection of his
friends, and published in 1634, five years after his death.[887] A
nun at Lisbon, Violante del Cielo, in 1646,[888] and Manoel de Melo,
in 1649,[889] gave proofs of a pride in the Castilian which we should
hardly have expected just at the time when their native country was
emancipating itself from the Spanish yoke; but which enabled them
to claim the favor of fashion alike at home and in Madrid. In 1652,
Moncayo published a volume of his own extravagant verses;[890] and,
two years later, persuaded his friend Francisco de la Torre to publish
a similar collection in equally bad taste.[891] Vergara followed, in
1660, under the affected title of “Ideas de Apolo,”[892] and Rozas, in
1662, under one still more affected,--“Conversation without Cards.”[893]
[887] Baena, Tom. I. p. 93. The works of Pantaleon are obvious
imitations of Góngora, as may be seen in his “Fábula de
Prosérpina,” “Fábula de Alfeo y Aretusa,” etc., though perhaps
still more in his sonnets and _décimas_. They were first printed
in 1634, but appeared several times afterwards, with slight
additions. My copy is of Madrid, 1648, 18mo.
[888] Violante del Cielo (do Ceo, in Portuguese) died in 1693,
ninety-two years old, having written and published many volumes
of Portuguese poetry and prose, some of the contents of which are
too gallant to be very nun-like. Her “Rimas,” chiefly Spanish,
were printed in Ruan, 1646, 12mo. One of the few poems among
them that can be read is an ode on the death of Lope de Vega (p.
44); though it should be added, that some of her short religious
poems, scattered elsewhere in her works, are better.
[889] Melo, who died in 1666, was one of the most successful
Portuguese authors of his time. (Barbosa, Tom. II. p. 182.)
His “Tres Musas del Melodino,” a volume containing his Spanish
poetry, and consisting, in a great measure, of sonnets, ballads,
odes, and other short lyrics, much in the manner of Quevedo, as
well as of Góngora, was printed twice, in 1649 and 1665,--the
former, Lisboa, 4to.
[890] Moncayo is also known by his title of Marques de San
Felices. His poems are entitled “Rimas de Don Juan de Moncayo í
Gurrea,” (Çaragoça, 1652, 4to), and consist of sonnets, a “Fábula
de Venus í Adonis,” ballads, etc. Latassa, Bib. Nueva, Tom. III.
p. 320.
[891] “Entretenimiento de las Musas en esta Baraxa Nueva de
Versos, dividida en Quatro Manjares, etc., por Fenix de la
Torre,” Çaragoça, 1654, 4to. The title speaks for itself. His
proper name was Francisco, and he was a Murcian.
[892] “Ydeas de Apolo y Dignas Tareas del Ocio Cortesano,”
Madrid, 1661, 4to; abounding in sonnets, religious ballads, and
courtly lyrics. A few of its poems are narrative, like one in
the ballad form on the story of Danae, and another at the end in
_ottava rima_, on the finding of the Virgin of Balvanera.
[893] “Noche de Invierno; Conversacion sin Naypes,” Madrid, 1662,
4to. The second part of this volume consists of burlesque poems,
full of miserable puns and rudenesses.
Ulloa, who prepared his poetry for the press as early as 1653, but did
not print it till many years afterwards, wrote sometimes pleasantly and
in a pure style, but often followed that prevailing in his time.[894]
And finally, in 1677, appeared “The Harp of Apollo,” by Salazar, quite
as bad as any of its predecessors, and quite worthy in all respects
to close up the series.[895] More names might be added, but they
would be of persons of less note; and even of those just enumerated
little is now remembered, and less read. The whole mass, indeed, is
of consequence chiefly to show the wide extent of the evil, and the
rapidity with which it spread on all sides.
[894] “Obras de Don Luis de Ulloa, Prosas y Versos,” of which the
second edition was published by his son, at Madrid, 1674, 4to.
Some of the religious poems, in the old measures, are among the
best of the volume; but the very best is the “Raquel,” in about
eighty octave stanzas, on the story of the love of Alfonso VIII.
for the fair Jewess of Toledo.
[895] “Cythara de Apolo,”--published after its author’s death
by Vera Tassis y Villarroel, “his greatest friend”;--the same
person who collected and published the plays of Calderon. Among
his works is a Soledad, in professed imitation of Góngora, and
Fábulas or Stories of Venus and Adonis, and Orpheus and Eurydice,
in the manner of Villamediana. Aug. de Salazar was born in 1642,
and died in 1675.
The depth to which it struck its roots may, however, be better
estimated, if we consider two things: the unavailing efforts made by
the leading spirits of the age to resist it, and the fact, that, after
all, they themselves--Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Calderon--yielded from
time to time to the popular taste, and wrote in the very style they
condemned.[896]
[896] Of Quevedo and Calderon I have already spoken; and
Montalvan, Zarate, Tirso de Molina, and most of the dramatists of
note, might have been added. Cervantes, in his old age, heeded
the new school little, but he complains of the obscure style of
poetry in his “Ilustre Fregona,” 1613, giving a specimen of it,
and alludes to it again in the second part of his Don Quixote, c.
16.
Of these distinguished men, the most prominent, whether we consider the
influence he exercised over his contemporaries or the interest he took
in this particular discussion, was, undoubtedly, Lope de Vega. Góngora
had, at some period, been personally known to him, probably when he was
in Andalusia in 1599, or earlier, when he was hastening to join the
Armada; and from this time Lope always retained an unaffected respect
for the Cordovan poet’s genius, and always rendered full justice to his
earlier merits. But he did not spare the extravagances of Góngora’s
later style; attacking it in his seventh Epistle; in an amusing sonnet,
where he represents Boscan and Garcilasso as unable to understand it;
in the poetical contest at the canonization of San Isidro; in the
verses prefixed to the “Orfeo” of Montalvan; and in many other places;
but, above all, in a long letter to a friend, who had formally asked
his judgment on the whole subject.[897]
[897] Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, Tom. I. pp. 271, 342; Tom.
XII. pp. 231-234; Tom. XIX. p. 49; and Tom. IV. pp. 459-482. In
the last cited passage, Lope says he always placed Fernando de
Herrera as a model before himself.
There can be no doubt, then, as to his deliberate opinion in relation
to it. Indeed, Góngora assailed him with great severity for it; and
though Lope continued to praise the uneasy poet for such of his works
as deserved commendation, the attack on his “cultivated style” was
never forgiven by Góngora, and a small volume of his unpublished
verse still shows that his bitterness continued to the last.[898]
And yet Lope himself not unfrequently fell into the very fault he so
sharply and wittily reprehended; as may be seen in many of his plays,
particularly in his “Wise Man in his own House,” where it is singularly
unsuited to the subject; and in many of his poems, especially his
“Circe” and his “Festival at Denia,” in which, if they had not been
addressed to courtly readers, it can hardly be doubted that he would
have used the simple and flowing style most natural to him.
[898] National Library, Madrid, Estante M, Codex 132, 4to. At
least, it _was_ there in 1818, at which date I saw it.
The affected style of Góngora was attacked by others;--by Cascales,
the rhetorician, in his “Poetical Tables,” printed in 1616, and in his
“Philological Letters,” printed later;[899] by Jauregui, the poet, in
his “Discourse on the Cultivated and Obscure Style,” in 1628;[900] and
by Salas, in 1633, in his “Inquiries concerning Tragedy.”[901] But the
most formidable attack sustained by this style was made by Quevedo,
who, in 1631, published both his Bachiller de la Torre, and the poetry
of Luis de Leon, intending to show by them what Spanish lyrical verse
might become, when, with a preservation of the national spirit, it was
founded on pure models, whether ancient or modern, whether Castilian
or foreign. From this attack--made, it should be observed, about
the time Góngora’s works and those of his most successful followers
were published, rather than at the time when they were written and
circulated in manuscript--his school never entirely recovered the
measure of its former triumphant success.[902]
[899] Tablas Poéticas, ed. 1779, p. 103. One of Góngora’s
friends, Mardones, answered Cascales, (Cartas Philológicas, 1771,
Dec. I. Cartas 8 and 10), who rejoined, and is again answered in
Carta 9.
[900] I have never seen this book, but Antonio, in his article
on Jauregui, gives its title, and Flögel (Gesch. der Komischen
Literatur, Tom. II. p. 303) gives the date of its publication.
Jauregui, however, in his translation of the “Pharsalia” of
Lucan, falls into the false style of Góngora. Declamacion contra
los Abusos de la Lengua Castellana, 1793, p. 138.
[901] Tragedia Antigua, Madrid, 1633, 4to, pp. 84, 85.
[902] See Appendix (G).
Quite unconscious of this discussion, if we may judge by his style and
manner, lived Francisco de Medrano, one of the purest and most genial
of Spanish lyric poets, and one who seemed to be such without an effort
to avoid the follies of his time. His poems, few in number, are better
than any thing in the “Sestinas” of Venegas, to which they form a sort
of supplement, and with which they were printed in 1617. Some of his
religious sonnets are especially to be noticed; but his Horatian odes,
and, above all, one on the Worthlessness of Human Pursuits, beginning,
“We all, we all mistake,” must be regarded as the best of his graceful
remains.[903]
[903] We know nothing of Medrano, except his poems, printed at
Palermo, in 1617, at the end of an imitation, rather than a
translation, of Ovid by Venegas. But Pedro Venegas de Saavedra
was a Sevilian gentleman, and Antonio (Bib. Nov., Tom. II. p.
246) hints that the imprint of the volume may not show the true
place of its publication.
Another writer of the same class, who can be traced back to 1584, but
who did not die till 1606, is Baltasar de Alcazar, a witty Andalusian,
who has left a moderate number of short lyrical poems, most of them
gay, and all of them in a better taste than was common when they
appeared.[904]
[904] He is mentioned in Cervantes, “Canto de Calíope,” and there
is a life of him in the notes to Sismondi, Spanish translation
(Tom. I. p 274). His poems are found in the “Flores” of Espinosa,
and in the eighteenth volume of Fernandez.
Similar praise, if not the same, may be given to Arguijo, a Sevilian
gentleman of fortune, distinguished by his patronage of letters,
to whom Lope de Vega dedicated three poems, and whose verses
Espinosa--apparently to attract favor for his book--placed at the
opening of his selections from the poets of his time. He wrote, if we
are to judge from the little that has come down to us, in the Italian
forms; for his twenty-nine sonnets,--which, with a singularly antique
air, are sometimes quite poetical,--a good _cancion_ on the death of a
friend, and another on a religious festival at Cadiz, constitute the
greater part of his known works. But his little lyric to his guitar,
which he calls simply a “Silva,” is worth all the rest. It is entirely
Spanish in its tone, and breathes a gentle sensibility, not unmingled
with sadness, that finds its way at once to the heart.[905]
[905] Varflora, Hijos de Sevilla, No. III. p. 14; Sismondi’s Lit.
Española por Figueroa, Tom. I. p. 282; Espinosa, Flores; and
Fernandez, Coleccion, Tom. XVIII. pp. 88-124. It may, perhaps,
be noted here, that the “Hijos de Sevilla Ilustres en Santidad,
Letras, Armas, Artes ó Dignidad,” published in that city in 1791,
in 8vo, is a poor book, but one that sometimes contains facts
not elsewhere to be found, and one that is now become very rare,
from the circumstance that it was published in separate numbers.
On its title-page it is said to have been written by Don Firmin
Arana de Varflora; but Blanco White, in “Doblado’s Letters,”
1822, p. 469, says its author was Padre Valderrama.
Antonio Balvas, who died in 1629, is of more humble pretensions as a
poet than either of the last, but perhaps was more distinctly opposed
than either of them to the fashionable taste. When in his old age he
had prepared for publication a volume of his verse, he called it, after
some hesitation, “The Castilian Poet,” and Lope de Vega pronounced it
to be purely written, and well fitted to a period “when,” as he added,
“the ancient language of the country was beginning to sound to him like
a strange tongue.” Still, in this very volume, humble in size and
modest in all its pretensions, Balvas compliments Góngora and praises
Ledesma: so necessary was it to conciliate the favored school.[906]
[906] “El Poeta Castellano, Antonio Balvas Barona, Natural de la
Ciudad de Segovia,” Valladolid, 1627, 12mo.
CHAPTER XXX.
LYRIC POETRY, CONTINUED.--THE ARGENSOLAS, JAUREGUI, ESTÉVAN VILLEGAS,
BALBUENA, BARBADILLO, POLO, ROJAS, RIOJA, ESQUILACHE, MENDOZA,
REBOLLEDO, QUIROS, EVIA, INEZ DE LA CRUZ, SOLÍS, CANDAMO, AND
OTHERS.--DIFFERENT CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LYRICAL POETRY, RELIGIOUS
AND SECULAR, POPULAR AND ELEGANT.
Among the lyric poets who flourished in Spain at the beginning of
the seventeenth century, and who were opposed to what began to be
called the “Gongorism” of the time, the first, as far as their general
influence was concerned, were the two brothers Argensola,--Aragonese
gentlemen of a good Italian family, which had come from Ravenna in the
time of Ferdinand and Isabella. The eldest of them, Lupercio Leonardo,
was born about 1564; and Bartolomé Leonardo, the other, was his junior
by only a year. Lupercio was educated for the civil service of his
country, and married young. Not far from the year 1587 he wrote the
three tragedies which have already been noticed, and two years later
was distinguished at Alcalá de Henares in one of the public poetical
contests then so common in Spain. In 1591, he was sent as an agent
of the government of Philip the Second to Saragossa, when Antonio
Perez fled into Aragon; and he subsequently became chronicler of that
kingdom, and private secretary of the Empress Maria of Austria.
The happiest part of the life of Lupercio was probably passed at
Naples, where he went, in 1610, with the Count de Lemos, when that
accomplished nobleman was made its viceroy, and seemed to be hardly
less anxious to have poets about him than statesmen,--taking both the
brothers, as part of his official suite, and not only giving Lupercio
the post of Secretary of State and of War, but authorizing him to
appoint his subordinates from among Spanish men of letters. But his
life at Naples was short. In March, 1613, he died suddenly, and was
buried with much solemnity by the Academy of the _Oziosi_, which he had
himself helped to establish, and of which Manso, the friend of Tasso
and of Milton, was then the head.
Bartolomé, who, like his brother, bore the name of Leonardo, was
educated for the Church, and, under the patronage of the Duke of
Villahermosa, early received a living in Aragon, which finally
determined his position in society. But, until 1610, when he went to
Naples, he lived a great deal at the University of Salamanca, where he
was devoted to literary pursuits and prepared his history of the recent
conquest of the Moluccas, which was printed in 1609. At Naples, he was
a principal personage in the poetical court of the Count de Lemos, and
showed, as did others with whom he was associated, a pleasant facility
in acting dramas, that were improvisated as they were performed. At
Rome, too, he was favorably known and patronized; and before his return
home in 1616, he was made chronicler of Aragon; a place in which he
succeeded his brother, and which he continued to enjoy till his own
death, in 1631.
There is little in what was most fortunate in the career of these
two remarkable brothers that can serve to distinguish them, except
the different lengths of their lives and the different amounts of
their works; for not only were both of them poets and possessed of
intellectual endowments able to command general respect, but both had
the good fortune to rise to positions in the world which gave them a
wide influence, and enabled them to become patrons of men of letters,
some of whom were their superiors. But both are now seldom mentioned,
except for a volume of poetry, chiefly lyrical, published in 1634,
after their deaths, by a son of Lupercio. It consists, he says, of such
of his father’s and his uncle’s poems as he had been able to collect,
but by no means of all they had written; for his father had destroyed
most of his manuscripts just before he died; and his uncle, though he
had given about twenty of his poems to Espinosa in 1605, had not, it is
apparent, been careful to preserve what had been only an amusement of
his leisure hours, rather than a serious occupation.
Such as it is, however, this collection of their poems shows the
same resemblance in their talents and tastes that was apparent in
their lives. Italy, a country in which their family had its origin,
where they had themselves lived, and some of whose poets they had
familiarly known, seems almost always present to their thoughts as
they write. Nor is Horace often absent. His philosophical spirit, his
careful, but rich, versification, and his tempered enthusiasm, are the
characteristic merits to which the Argensolas aspired alike in their
formal odes and in the few of their poems that take the freer and
more national forms. The elder shows, on the whole, more of original
power; but he left only half as many poems, by which to judge his
merits, as his brother did. The younger is more graceful, and finishes
his compositions with more care and judgment. Both, notwithstanding
they were Aragonese, wrote with entire purity of style, so that Lope
de Vega said “it seemed as if they had come from Aragon to reform
Castilian verse.” Both, therefore, are to be placed high in the list of
Spanish lyric poets;--next, perhaps, after the great masters;--a rank
which we most readily assign them, when we are considering the shorter
poems addressed by the elder to the lady he afterwards married, and the
purity of manner and sustained dignity of feeling which mark the longer
compositions of each.[907]
[907] All needful notices of the two Argensolas and their
works--and more too--can be found in the elaborate lives of
them by Pellicer, in his “Biblioteca de Traductores,” 1778, pp.
1-141; and by Latassa, in the “Biblioteca Nueva de Escritores
Aragoneses,” Tom. II. pp. 143, 461. Besides the original edition
of their Rimas, (Zaragoza, 1634, 4to), two editions are found in
Fernandez, “Coleccion,” the last being of 1804. The sonnet of
Bartolomé on Sleep is commonly much admired; but of _his_ poems I
prefer the sonnet on Providence, (p. 330), and the ode in honor
of the Church after the battle of Lepanto, ed. 1634, p. 372.
Among those who followed the Argensolas, the earliest of their
successful imitators was probably Jauregui, a Sevilian gentleman,
descended from an old Biscayan family, and born about 1570. Having a
talent for painting, as well as poetry,--a fact we learn in many ways,
and among the rest from an epigrammatic sonnet of Lope de Vega,--he
went to Rome and devoted himself to the study of the art to which, at
first, he seems to have given his life. But still poetry drew him away
from the path he had chosen. In 1607, while at Rome, he published a
translation of the “Aminta” of Tasso, and from that time was numbered
among the Spanish poets who were valued at home and abroad. On his
return to Spain, he seems to have gone to Madrid, where, heralded by a
good reputation, he was kindly received at court. This was probably as
early as 1613, for Cervantes in that year mentioned in his “Tales” a
portrait of himself, painted, as he says, “by the famous Jauregui.”
In 1618, however, he was again in Seville, and published a collection
of his works; but in 1624 his “Orfeo” appeared at Madrid,--a poem
in five short cantos, on the story of Orpheus. It is written with
much less purity of style than might have been expected from one who
afterwards denounced the extravagances of Góngora. Still, it attracted
so lively an interest, that Montalvan thought it worth while to
publish another on the same subject, in competition with it, as soon
as possible;--a rivalship in which he was openly abetted by his great
master, Lope de Vega.[908] Both poems seem to have been well received,
and both authors continued to enjoy the favor of the capital till
their deaths, which happened at about the same time; that of Jauregui
as late as 1640, when he finished a too free translation, or rather a
presumptuous and distasteful rearrangement, of Lucan’s “Pharsalia.”
[908] It is a curious fact, and one somewhat characteristic of
the carelessness with which works in Spain were attributed to
persons who did not write them, that the “Orfeo” of Jauregui is
printed in the “Cythara de Apolo,” a collection of the posthumous
poems of Agustin de Salazar, (which appeared at Madrid, 1694,
4to), as if it were his. So far as I have compared the two, I
find nothing altered but the first stanza, and the title of the
poem, which, instead of being simply called “Orfeo,” as it was
by its author, is entitled, in imitation of Góngora’s school,
“Fábula de Euridice y Orfeo.”
The reputation of Jauregui rests on the volume of poems he himself
published in 1618. The translation of Tasso’s “Aminta,” with which it
opens, is elaborately corrected from the edition he had previously
printed at Rome, without being always improved by the changes he
introduced. But, in each of its forms, it is probably the most
carefully finished and beautiful translation in the Spanish language;
marked by great ease and facility in its versification, and especially
by the charming lyrical tone that runs with such harmony and sweetness
through the Italian.
Jauregui’s original poems are few, and now and then betray the same
traces of submission to the influence of Góngora that are to be seen
in his “Orfeo” and “Pharsalia.” But the more lyrical portions--which,
except those on religious subjects, have a very Italian air--are
almost entirely free from such faults. The Ode on Luxury is noble
and elevated; and the _silva_ on seeing his mistress bathing, more
cautiously managed than the similar scene in Thomson’s “Summer,” is
admirable in its diction, and betrays in its beautiful picturesqueness
something of its author’s skill and refinement in the kindred art to
which he had devoted himself. His sonnets and shorter pieces are less
successful.[909]
[909] Sedano, Tom. IX. p. xxii. Lope de Vega, Obras Sueltas, Tom.
I. p. 38. Signorelli, Storia de’ Teatri, 1813, Tom. VI. p. 13.
Cervantes, Novelas, Prólogo. Orfeo de Juan de Jauregui, Madrid,
1624, 4to. Fernandez, Coleccion, Tom. VII. and VIII., containing
the “Farsalia”; and Rimas de Juan de Jauregui, Sevilla, 1618,
4to, reprinted by Fernandez, Tom. VI. But the best text of the
“Amynta” is that in Sedano, (Parnaso, Tom. I.), which is made by
a collation of both the editions that were prepared by Jauregui
himself. Of this beautiful version it may be noted that Cervantes
(Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 62) says, as he does of the “Pastor
Fido” by Figueroa, “We happily doubt which is the translation and
which the original.” The “Farsalia” of Jauregui was not printed
till 1684.
Jauregui’s _silva_ on seeing his mistress bathing can be
compared, much to its advantage and honor, with a longer _silva_
on the same subject, entitled “Anaxarete,” and published at the
end of his “Gigantomachia,” by Manuel de Gallegos, Lisboa, 1628,
4to, ten years after the appearance of Jauregui’s poem. The
“Anaxarete” is not without graceful passages, but it is much too
long, and shows frequent traces of the school of Góngora.
Another of the followers of the Argensolas--and one who boasted that
he had trodden in their footsteps from the days of his boyhood, when
Bartolomé had been pointed out to his young admiration in the streets
of Madrid--was Estévan Manuel de Villegas.[910] He was born at Naxera,
in 1596, and was educated partly at court and partly at Salamanca,
where he studied the law. After 1617, or certainly as early as 1626,
when he was married, he almost entirely abandoned letters, and gave
himself up to such profitable occupations connected with his profession
as would afford subsistence to those dependent on his labors. He,
however, found leisure to prepare for publication a number of learned
dissertations on ancient authors; to make considerable progress in a
professional commentary on the “Codex Theodosianus”; and to publish, in
1665, as a consolation for his own sorrows, a translation of Boethius,
which, besides its excellent version of the poetical parts, is among
the good specimens of Castilian prose. But he remained, during his
whole life, unpatronized and poor, and died in 1669, an unfortunate and
unhappy man.[911]
[910] This allusion occurs in a satire on the _culto_ style of
poetry, not found in his collected works, but in Sedano, (Tom.
IX., 1778, p. 8), where it appeared for the first time.
[911] An excellent life of Villegas is prefixed to the edition of
his Works, Madrid, 1774, 2 tom. 8vo, said by Guarinos (Biblioteca
de Escritores del Reinado de Carlos III., Madrid, 1785, 8vo, Tom.
V. p. 19) to have been written by Vicente de los Rios.
The gay and poetical part of the life of Villegas--the period when
he presumptuously announced himself as the rising sun, and attacked
Cervantes, thinking to please the Argensolas[912]--began very early,
and was soon darkened by the cares and troubles of the world. He tells
us himself that he wrote much of his poetry when he was only fourteen
years old; and he certainly published nearly the whole of it when he
was hardly twenty-one.[913] And yet there are few volumes in the
Spanish language that afford surer proofs of a poetical temperament.
It is divided into two parts. The first contains versions of a number
of Odes from the First Book of Horace, and a translation of the whole
of Anacreon, followed by imitations of Anacreon’s manner, on subjects
relating to their author. The second contains satires and elegies,
which are really epistles; idyls in the Italian _ottava rima_; sonnets,
in the manner of Petrarch; and “Latinas,” as he calls them, from the
circumstance that they are written in the measures of Roman verse.
[912] In the edition of his poetry published by himself and at
his own expense, in 1617, 4to, at Naxera, his birthplace, he
gives on the title-page a print of the rising sun, with the
stars growing dim, and two mottoes to explain its meaning: the
first, “Sicut sol matutinus,” and the other, “Me surgente, quid
istæ?“--the _istæ_ whom he thus slights being Lope de Vega,
Quevedo, and indeed the whole galaxy of the best period of
Spanish literature. Lope seems to have been a little annoyed at
this impertinence and vanity of Villegas; for, in allusion to it,
he says, in the midst of a passage otherwise laudatory,--
Aunque dixo que todos se escondiesen,
Quando los rayos de su ingenio viesen.
Laurel de Apolo, Madrid, 1630, 4to, Silva iii.
For the harsh words of Villegas about Cervantes, see Navarrete,
Vida, § 128.
[913]
Mis dulces cantilenas,
Mis suaves delicias,
A los veinte limadas
I á los catorce escritas.
Ed. 1617, f. 88.
A poetical spirit runs through the whole. The translations are
generally free, but more than commonly true to the genius of their
originals. The “Latinas” are curious. They fill only a few pages; but,
except slight specimens of the ancient measures in the choruses of the
two tragedies of Bermudez, forty years before, they are the first and
the only attempt worthy of notice, to introduce into the Castilian
those forms of verse which, a little before the time of Bermudez, had
obtained some success in France, and which, a little later, our own
Spenser sought to establish in English poetry.
But though Villegas did not succeed in this, he succeeded in his
imitations of Anacreon. We seem, indeed, as we read them, to have the
simple and joyous spirit of ancient festivity and love revived before
us, with nothing, or almost nothing, of what renders that spirit
offensive. The ode to a little bird whose nest had been robbed; one
to himself, “Love and the Bee”; the imitation of “Ut flos in septis,”
by Catullus; and, indeed, nearly every one of the smaller pieces that
compose the third book of the first division, with several in the first
book, are beautiful in their kind, and give such a faithful impression
of the native sweetness of Anacreon as is not easily found elsewhere
in modern literature. We close the volume of Villegas, therefore, with
sincere regret that he, who, in his boyhood, could write poetry so
beautiful,--poetry so imbued with the spirit of antiquity, and yet so
full of the tenderness of modern feeling; so classically exact, and yet
so fresh and natural,--should have survived its publication above forty
years without finding an interval when the cares and disappointments
of the world permitted him to return to the occupations that made his
youth happy, and that have preserved his name for a posterity of which,
when he first lisped in numbers, he could hardly have had a serious
thought.[914]
[914] There is an interesting notice of Villegas and his works by
the kindred spirit of Wieland, in the Deutsche Merkur, 1774, Tom.
V. pp. 237, etc.; the first time, I suspect, that his name had
been mentioned with the praise it deserves, out of Spain, for a
century. It should be remembered, however, that Villegas, though
he generally wrote with very great simplicity, and, in his Elegy
to Bartolomé de Argensola (Eróticas, 1617, Tom. II. f. 28) and
elsewhere, censures the obscure and affected writers of his time,
yet sometimes himself writes in the bad style he condemns, and
devotes his sixth Elegy to praise of the absurd “Phaeton” of the
Count Villamediana.
We pass over Balbuena, whose best lyric poetry is found in his prose
romance;[915] and Salas Barbadillo, who has scattered similar poetry
through his various publications and collected more of it in his
“Castilian Rhymes.”[916] Both of them flourished before 1630, and,
like Polo,[917] whose talent lay chiefly in lighter compositions, and
Rojas, who succeeded best in pastorals of a very lyric tone,[918] they
lived at a time when Lope de Vega was pouring forth floods of verse,
which were not only sufficient to determine the main current of the
literature of the country, but to sweep along, undistinguished in its
turbulent flood, the contributions of many a stream, smaller, indeed,
than its own, but purer and more graceful.
[915] In the Academy’s edition of the “Siglo de Oro,” Madrid,
1821, 8vo, there is other poetry besides that contained in the
pastoral itself.
[916] Poems are found in all the stories of Salas Barbadillo,
which would, perhaps, double the amount published by himself in
his “Rimas Castellanas,” Madrid, 1618, 12mo, and by his friends
after his death, in the “Coronas del Parnaso,” Madrid, 1635,
12mo. The volume of Rimas is more than half made up of sonnets
and epigrams.
[917] “Obras de Salvador Jacinto Polo,” Zaragoça, 1670, 4to. His
“Apollo and Daphne” is partly in ridicule of the _culto_ style.
[918] “Desengaño del Amor en Rimas por Pedro Soto de Rojas,”
Madrid, 1623, 4to. He was of Granada, and, as his sonnets show, a
great admirer of Góngora.
Among these was the poetry of Francisco de Rioja, a native of Seville,
who was born in 1600, and died in 1658. From the circumstance that he
occupied a high place in the Inquisition, he might have counted on a
shelter from the storms of state, if he had not connected himself too
much with the Count Duke Olivares, whose fall drew after it that of
nearly all who had shared in his intrigues, or sought the protection of
his overshadowing patronage. But the disgrace of Rioja was temporary;
and the latter part of his life, which he gave to letters at Seville,
seems to have been as happy and fortunate as the first.
The amount of his poetry that has come down to us is small, but it is
all valued and read. Some of his sonnets are uncommonly felicitous. So
are his ode “To Riches,” imitated from Horace, and the corresponding
one “To Poverty,” which is quite original. In that “To the Opening
Year,” exhorting his young friend Fonseca, almost in the words of
Pericles, not to lose the springtime out of his life, there is much
tenderness and melancholy; a reflection, perhaps, of the regrets that
he felt for mistakes in his own early and more ambitious career. But
his chief distinction has generally come from an ode, full of sadness
and genius, “On the Ruins of Italica,”--that Roman city, near Seville,
which claims the honor of having given birth to Trajan, and which he
celebrates with the enthusiasm of one whose childish fancy had been
nourished by wandering among the remains of its decaying amphitheatre
and fallen palaces. This distinction has, however, been contested;
and the ode in question, or rather a part of it, has been claimed for
Rodrigo Caro, known in his time rather as an antiquarian than as a
poet, among whose unpublished works a sketch of it is found with the
date of 1595, which, if genuine, carries the general conception, and
at least one of the best stanzas, back to a period before the birth of
Rioja.[919]
[919] The poetry of Rioja was not published till near the end
of the eighteenth century, when it appeared in the collections
of Sedano and Fernandez in 1774 and 1797. The two odes of Rioja
and Caro are printed together in the Spanish translation of
Sismondi’s “History of Spanish Literature,” Sevilla, 1842, in the
notes to which is the best account to be found of Rioja. (Tom.
II. p. 173.) Rioja, it may be added, was a friend of Lope de
Vega, who addressed to him a pleasant poetical epistle on his own
garden, which was first printed in 1622.
Among those who opposed the school of Góngora, and perhaps the person
who, from his influence in society, could best have checked its power,
if he had not himself been sometimes betrayed into its bad taste,
was the Prince Borja y Esquilache. His titles--which are, in fact,
corruptions of the great names borne by the Italian principalities
of Borgia and Squillace--betray his origin, and explain some of his
tendencies. But though, by a strange coincidence, he was great-grandson
of Pope Alexander the Sixth, and grandson of one of the heads of the
Order of the Jesuits, he was also descended from the old royal family
of Aragon, and had a faithful Spanish heart. From his high rank, he
easily found a high place in public affairs. He was distinguished
both as a soldier and as a diplomatist; and at one time he rose to be
viceroy of Peru, and administered its affairs during six years with
wisdom and success.
But, like many others of his countrymen, he never forgot letters amidst
the anxieties of public life; and, in fact, found leisure enough to
write several volumes of poetry. Of these, the best portions are
his lyrical ballads. His sonnets, too, are good, especially those
in a gayer vein, and so are his madrigals, which, like that “To a
Nightingale,” are often graceful and sometimes tender. In general,
those of his shorter compositions which are a little epigrammatic in
their tone and very simple in their language are the best. They belong
to a class constantly reappearing in Spanish literature, of which the
following may be taken as a favorable specimen:--
Ye little founts, that laughing flow
And frolic with the sands,
Say, whither, whither do ye go,
And what such speed demands?
From all the tender flowers ye fly,
And haste to rocks,--rocks rude and high;
Yet, if ye here can gently sleep,
Why such a wearying hurry keep?[920]
[920]
Fuentecillas, que reis,
Y con la arena jugais,
Donde vais?
Pues de las flores huis,
Y los peñascos buscais.
Si reposais
Donde risueña dormis,
Porque correis, y os cansais?
Obras en Verso de Borja, Amberes, 1663, 4to, p. 395.
Borja was much respected during his long life; and died at Madrid,
his native city, in 1658, seventy-seven years old. His religious
poetry, some of which was first published after his death, has little
value.[921]
[921] The life of Borja is in Baena, Tom. II. p. 175; and his
opinions on poetry, defending the older and simpler school, are
set forth in some _décimas_ prefixed to his “Obras en Verso,” of
which there are editions of 1639, 1654, and 1663. Of his lyrical
ballads, I would notice particularly, in the edition of Amberes,
1663, 4to, Nos. 40, 66, and 129. The trifle translated in the
text is No. 20 among the poems which he calls _Bueltas_, a sort
of _refrain_, with a gloss, where much poetical ingenuity is
shown, in the turn both of the thought and of the phraseology.
Antonio de Mendoza, the courtly dramatist, who flourished between 1630
and 1660, is also to be numbered among the lyric poets of his time; and
so are Cancer y Velasco, Cubillo, and Zarate, all of whom died in the
latter part of the same period. Mendoza and Cancer inclined to the old
national measures, and the two others to the Italian. None of them,
however, is now often remembered.[922]
[922] “El Fenix Castellano de Ant. de Mendoza,” Lisboa, 1690,
4to; “Obras Poéticas de Gerónimo Cancer y Velasco,” 1650, and
Madrid, 1761, 4to; with Latassa, Bib. Nueva, Tom. III. p. 224;
“El Enano de las Musas de Alvaro Cubillo de Aragon,” Madrid,
1654, 4to, who was, however, of Granada; and “Obras Varias de Fr.
Lopez de Zarate,” Alcalá, 1651, 4to, which, after a great deal of
worthless poetry, both in Spanish and Italian measures, contains,
at the end, his equally worthless tragedy, “Hercules Furens y
Œta, _con todo el rigor del Arte_.”
Not so the Count Bernardino de Rebolledo, a gentleman of the ancient
Castilian stamp, who, though not a great poet, is one of those that are
still kept in the memory and regard of their countrymen. He was born
at Leon, in 1597, and from the age of fourteen was a soldier; serving
first against the Turks and the powers of Barbary, and afterwards,
during the Thirty Years’ war, in different parts of Germany, where,
from the Emperor Ferdinand, he received the title of Count. In 1647,
when peace returned, he was made ambassador to Denmark and lived long
in the North, connected, as his poetry often proves him to have been,
with the Danish court and with that of Christina of Sweden, in whose
conversion one of his letters shows that he bore a part.[923] From 1662
he was a minister of state at Madrid; and when he died, in 1676, he was
burdened with offices of all kinds, and enjoyed pensions and salaries
to the amount of fifty thousand ducats a year.
[923] Obras, Madrid, 1778, 8vo, Tom. I. p. 571.
It is singular that the poetry of a Spaniard should have first appeared
in the North of Europe. But so it was in the case of Count Rebolledo.
One volume of his works was published at Cologne in 1650, and another
at Copenhagen in 1655. Each contains lyrical poems, both in the
national and the Italian forms; and if none of them are remarkable,
many are written with simplicity, and a few are beyond the spirit of
their time.[924]
[924] There is a notice of Rebolledo, which must have been
prepared by his own authority, in the Preface to his “Ocios,”
printed at Antwerp, 1650, 18mo; but there is a better life of him
in the fifth volume of Sedano’s “Parnaso”; and his poetry, and
every thing relating to him, is found in his Works printed at
Madrid, 1778, 3 tom. 8vo, the first volume being in two parts.
Some of his poetry falls into _Gongoresque_ affectations. He
wrote a single play, “Amar despreciando Riesgos,” which he called
a tragicomedy, and which is not without merit.
The names of several other authors might be added to this list, though
they would add nothing to its dignity or value. Among them are Ribero,
a Portuguese; Pedro Quiros, a Sevilian of note; Barrios, the persecuted
Jew; Lucio y Espinossa, an Aragonese; Evia, a native of Guayaquil in
Peru; Inez de la Cruz, a Mexican nun; Solís, the historian; Candamo,
the dramatist; and Marcante, Montoro, and Negrete;--all of whom lived
in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the last three of
whom reached the threshold of the eighteenth, when the poetical spirit
of their country seems to have become all but absolutely extinct.[925]
[925] Ant. Luiz Ribero de Barros, “Jornada de Madrid,” Madrid,
1672, 4to; a poor miscellany of prose and verse, whose author
died in 1683. (Barbosa, Bib., Tom. I. p. 313.)--Pedro Quiros,
1670, best found in Sismondi, Lit. Esp., Sevilla, 1842, Tom. II.
p. 187, note; and Varflora, No. IV. p. 68.--Miguel de Barrios,
“Flor de Apolo,” Bruselas, 1665, 4to, and “Coro de las Musas,”
Bruselas, 1672, 18mo.--“Ociosidad Ocupada y Ocupacion Ociosa
de Felix de Lucio y Espinossa,” Roma, 1674, 4to; a hundred bad
sonnets. (Latassa, Bib. Nov., Tom. IV. p. 22.)--Jacinto de Evia,
“Ramillete de Flores Poéticas,” Madrid, 1676, 4to, which contains
other poems besides his own.--Inez de la Cruz, la Décima Musa,
“Poemas,” Zaragoza, 1682-1725, 3 tom. 4to, etc.--Ant. de Solís,
“Poesías,” Madrid, 1692, 4to.--Candamo, “Obras Líricas,” s. a.
18mo.--Joseph Perez de Montoro, “Obras Póstumas Lyricas, Humanas
y Sagradas,” Madrid, 1736, 2 tom. 4to; not printed, I think, till
that year, though their author died in 1694.--Manuel de Leon
Marcante, “Obras Póstumas,” Madrid, 1733, 2 tom. 4to; where some
of the _villancicos_, by their rudeness, not their poetry, recall
Juan de la Enzina.--And, Joseph Tafalla Negrete, “Ramillete
Poético,” Zaragoça, 1706, 4to; to which last add Latassa, Bib.
Nueva, Tom. IV. p. 104.--Perhaps a volume printed in Valencia,
1680, 4to, and entitled “Varias Hermosas Flores del Parnaso,”
will, especially if compared with the similar work of Espinosa
printed in 1605, give the fairest idea of the low state of poetry
at the time it appeared. It contains poems by Ant. Hurtado de
Mendoza, by Solís, and by the following poets, otherwise unknown
to me: namely, Francisco de la Torre y Sebil, Rodrigo Artes y
Muñoz, Martin, Juan Barcelo, and Juan Bautista Aguilar;--all
worthless. Of the persons mentioned in this note, the one that
produced the greatest sensation, after Solís, was Inez de la
Cruz,--a remarkable woman, but not a remarkable poet, who was
born in Guipuzcoa in 1651, and died in the city of Mexico in
1695. Semanario Pintoresco, 1845, p. 12.
But though its latter period is dark and disheartening, lyric poetry
in Spain, from the time of Charles the Fifth to the accession of the
Bourbons, had, on the whole, a more fortunate career than it enjoyed
in any other of the countries of Europe, except Italy and England, and
shows, in each of its different classes, traits that are original,
striking, and full of the national character.
Perhaps, from the difficulty of satisfying the popular taste in what
was matter of such solemn regard, without adhering to the ancient and
settled forms, its _religious_ portions, more frequently than any
other, bear a marked resemblance to the simplest and oldest movements
of the national genius. Generally, they are picturesque, like the
little songs we have by Ocaña on the Madonna at Bethlehem, and on the
Flight to Egypt. Sometimes they are rude and coarse, recalling the
_villancicos_ sung by the shepherds of the early religious dramas. But
almost always, even when they grow mystical and fall into bad taste,
they are completely imbued with the spirit of the Catholic faith,--a
spirit more distinctly impressed on the lyric poetry of Spain, in this
department, than it is on any other of modern times.
Nor is the _secular_ portion less strongly marked, though with
attributes widely different. In its popular divisions, it is fresh,
natural, and often rustic. Some of the short _canciones_, with which
it abounds, and some of its _chanzonetas_, overflow with tenderness,
and yet end waywardly with an epigrammatic point or a jest. Its
_villancicos_, _letras_, and _letrillas_ are even more true to the
nature of the people, and more fully express the popular feeling.
Generally they seize a common incident or an obvious thought for
their subject. Sometimes it is a little girl, who, in her childish
simplicity, confesses to her mother the very passion she is
instinctively anxious to conceal. Sometimes it is one older and more
severely tried, deprecating a power she is no longer able to control.
And sometimes it is a fortunate and happy maiden, openly exulting in
her love as the light and glory of her life. Many of these little
lyrical snatches are anonymous, and express the feelings of the lower
classes of society, from whose hearts they came as freshly as did the
old ballads, with which they are often found mingled, and to which they
are almost always akin. Their forms, too, are old and characteristic,
and there is occasionally a frolicsome and mischievous spirit in
them,--not unimbued with the truest tenderness and passion,--which,
again, is faithful to their origin, and unlike any thing found in the
poetry of other nations.
In the division of secular lyric poetry that is less popular and less
faithful to the traditions of the country a large diversity of spirit
is exhibited, and exhibited almost always in the Italian measures.
Sonnets, above all, were looked upon with extravagant favor during the
whole of this period, and their number became enormously large; larger,
perhaps, than that of all the ballads in the language. But from this
restricted form up to that of long grave odes, in regularly constructed
stanzas of nineteen or twenty lines each, we have every variety of
manner;--much that is solemn, stately, and imposing, but much, also,
that is light, gay, and genial.
Taking all the different classes of Spanish lyric poetry together, the
number of authors whose works, or some of them, have been preserved,
between the beginning of the reign of Charles the Fifth and the end
of that of the last of his race, is not less than a hundred and
twenty.[926] But the number of those who were successful is small,
as it is everywhere, and the amount of real poetry produced, even by
the best, is rarely considerable. A little of what was written by the
Argensolas, more of Herrera, and nearly the whole of the Bachiller
de la Torre and Luis de Leon,--with occasional efforts of Lope de
Vega and Quevedo, and single odes of Figueroa, Jauregui, Arguijo, and
Rioja,--make up what gives its character to the graver and less popular
portion of Spanish lyric poetry. And if to these we add Villegas, who
stands quite separate, uniting the spirit of Greek antiquity to that
of a truly Castilian genius, and the fresh, graceful popular songs and
roundelays, which, by their very nature, break loose from all forms
and submit to no classification, we shall have a body of poetry, not,
indeed, large, but one that, for its living national feeling on the
one side, and its dignity on the other, may be placed without question
among the more successful efforts of modern literature.
[926] I possess, I believe, works of more than one hundred and
twenty lyric poets of this period.
END OF VOL. II.