The Later Renaissance

PIRIT-WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS-ITS TECHNIQUE AND MATTER-ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL-BOSCAN-GARCILASO

point of the

e had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of Castiglione's Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as not inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write "in the Italian manner." Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to Bar

l influenc

n manner" in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is characteristi

of the clas

d Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of praise-the word docto. The literal sense is "learned," but educated expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was the language of education and diplomacy,

tocratic

he only world to which they appealed. They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured the romances and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from Góngorism by the sight of better examples, while Góngora was able to found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to find readers among the vulgo, the common herd, of whose brutez, or bes

itated from

lable, which the Spaniards allowed to be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous in their hands. The c?sura fell with unvarying regularity after the fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more slavish in imitation than their predecessors[36] had been. Its technique and matter. This slavishness was shown by the establishment of the endecasílabo piano, with the unaccented vowel termination as alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in vocablos agudos, in masculine rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a

ip Sidney. The Egemplar is in tercets, and the Apologie in fresh youthful prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox. On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the Sevillian[38] is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence of consistency and decency, the duty of desp

at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates the right of his[39] countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive, Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please. Poetry was to imit

of the work

The same Tirsis and the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the life of their time,-but that is a small matter. They have-piety and patriotism apart-little human reality of any kind. Love according to[40] an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the Florentines, is the staple subject.

tch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads-the Lyric and the Epic-and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant. The leading form in lyric poetry is the cancion in hendecasyllables with quebrados-that is,

sc

ter of his pen. In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains of his prose-a letter to his friend's wife praising her good taste for enjoying the Courtier of[42] Castiglione-there is hardly a word or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited-once at Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as the author of the Minerva; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera. The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the editors of Góngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing literary quarrel. The Castilian critics, who were banded in support of their own man, Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his inappropriate display of scholas

4

mediate

oubtful, author of the Lazarillo de Tormes. Diego de Mendoza (1503-1575) was a younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one of the many titled branches of his famous house-the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct descendant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him of that Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the king at the battle of Aljubarrota.[11] His poetry was the relaxation of a great noble who broke through the rules in a fashion well calculated to horrify such critics as Juan de la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him to burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that order. Sometimes it flamed out with little regard to decency. But in happier moments-as, for instance, in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa-he could strike that note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which is the finest in Spanish poetry. Even in his case we have examples

ls of Salaman

of Solomon, which,[46] at a time when the Reformers were making an active use of the Bible in the vernacular tongues against the Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano, of whose De Locis Theologicis Dr Johnson wrote, "Nec admiror, nec multum laudo." It is a well-known story of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the Holy Office was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume his lectures, he began where he had left off, and with the words, "As we were saying yesterday, gentlemen." His poetry may be divided into that part which is inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by the Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should appear to more advantage when he is paraphrasing the description of a perfect wife from the Proverbs of Solomon than when he is endeavouring to adapt the lira of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken because it bore a certain resemblance to the subject of one of the odes of Horac

s death. The remainder was published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619. Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their language which display the greatest measure of force and dignity, would certainly quote the famous odes on the battles of Lepanto and Alcázar el-Quebir, together with the sonnet in honour of Don John o

oja, the poet of flowers, and the author of a moral poem on the Ruins of Italica (a Roman colony near Seville), inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many others, must be passed over in silence. It is proper to note, however, that whatever anybody else was doing at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great

and Gó

re some which possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very[49] rare among the Spaniards. The third cancion, for instance, contains a singularly passionate and admirably worded variation, on the theme of Shakespeare's forty-fourth sonnet, "If the dull substance of my flesh were thought." But it was not for this, the work of his earlier years, that the reputation of Góngora has been spread over the world, but because he, to steal an image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the side of Parnassus, as the inventor of "El Culteranismo" or "Góngorism." At some period in his life he began to write in this style. Hostile critics say he did so because he could not attract

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ng people stare, and the thing is easily accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead which men drink out of horns "the windless wave of the wild bull's spear," or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though the mistake was incomparably more excusable in

ation, the conceptista, or conceited style, which is more like our "metaphysical" manner, but never had the popularity of Góngorism. The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name of the B

Ep

, in imitation of Ariosto, and this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which the Don Luis de[53] Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish, the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could. Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of Famous Men of the Indies-Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias-of Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could in a fashion write ottava rima stanza. He seems to have thought that "Elegy" meant much the same thing as "Eulogy," and his Elegias are, in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crow

Arau

mitted the name of his general, the Marquis of Ca?ete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared[55] in three parts in 1569, 1575, and 1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the Araucana can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to print it because it was a true history of wars he

aims to remembrance must rest."[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. I

Lusi

m Portuguese history, and the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which has been claimed for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied-and no one need wish to deny-that Camoens wrote his own language with great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyr

might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt's voyages. Now and then he will find incidents-the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of Love-where the intention to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity, and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again there a

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