THE STARTING-POINT OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL—THE NATURAL INFLUENCE OF ITALY—PREVALENCE OF THE CLASSIC SCHOOL—ITS ARISTOCRATIC SPIRIT—WHAT WAS IMITATED FROM THE ITALIANS—ITS TECHNIQUE AND MATTER—ARTIFICIALITY OF THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL—BOSCAN—GARCILASO—THEIR IMMEDIATE FOLLOWERS—THE SCHOOLS OF SALAMANCA AND SEVILLE—GÓNGORA AND GÓNGORISM—THE EPICS—THE ‘ARAUCANA’—THE ‘LUSIADS.’

Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that the manner of the introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables us to see for once in a way exactly, when and at whose instigation a literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement, in the long letter to the Duchess of Soma, which is printed as a preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.[5] En (to give him his native title) Juan Boscan Almogaver was a Catalan of a noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as not inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write “in the Italian manner.” Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts, and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon custom, were combined into Garcilaso.[6] He was born in 1503 of a very ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from a ladder while leading a storming-party at FrÈjus in 1536. Little is known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that they cannot have seen much of one another, for Boscan spent most of his life on his estate or at Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all who followed “the conquering banners” of the emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from the Danube to Tunis.

It would unquestionably be an error to conclude from the exact manner of its beginning that there would have been no Spanish imitation of Italian models if Boscan had not met Navagiero at Granada in 1526. Garcilaso, Diego de Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and canzones “in the Italian manner” in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is characteristic of the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of ingenuity, and as an amusement for his leisure. He implies that Garcilaso acted on the same motives as himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils and produce only school exercises.

The ample following found by these two is itself a proof that Navagiero’s advice and Boscan’s docility were hardly necessary. It needed only an accident to provoke the literary activity of the Italianate Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in the Court of Rome, at Naples, and at home, where the “learned” men were all readers of Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read in Spain, though a few of her scholars were good Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of praise—the word docto. The literal sense is “learned,” but educated expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was the language of education and diplomacy, and Italian was the language of society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full sense of the word. The seed fell on well-prepared soil. A quick and copious harvest sprang up, which for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary growth. The second half of the sixteenth century was the time of the learned poets of Spain. The school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth century, but it had produced its best work before 1600.

The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to expect to find it composed of imitators who produced more or less ingenious school exercises. Its works are extant to show that the expectation would be well founded. Again, we should expect to find that it was always much more of a society fashion than a manifestation of the real qualities of the Spaniard in literature, and here also experience will be found to confirm expectation. It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite so indifferent to appearing in print as some others have been, but still not uncommonly satisfied to leave its work in manuscript. These poets could afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did not thereby injure their fame in the only world to which they appealed. They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured the romances and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from GÓngorism by the sight of better examples, while GÓngora was able to found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to find readers among the vulgo, the common herd, of whose brutez, or bestial stupidity, they habitually spoke in a very high and mighty fashion. This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the learned poets of Spain. It was habitual with the school of Ronsard, and indeed common to the whole Renaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain’s learned poets were not different from those of the Italian, the Frenchman, or the Englishman, they were less fully justified. These very self-conscious “children of the Muses” were not so superior to the vulgar herd of writers of romances and coplas in poetic inspiration as to be entitled to look down upon them, on the strength of a certain mechanical dexterity acquired from foreigners by imitation.

The question what exactly it was that the innovators of the sixteenth century took from their Italian masters is easier to put than to answer. The mere imitation of Italian models was in itself no novelty. Cristobal de Castillejo denied the claim of the new school to originality in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he said, already been written by Juan de Mena. So they had, and by Ausias March and other poets of the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model; the ottava rima and tercets were not unknown to the Court school of Castile or to the Catalans. The canzone had been written in Spain by imitators of the earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the innovators to take? If we look at the names only, and the bare skeleton of the verse, little indeed; but when the manner of the execution is considered, a great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the Spaniards allowed to be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous in their hands. The cÆsura fell with unvarying regularity after the fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more slavish in imitation than their predecessors had been. "Its technique and matter." This slavishness was shown by the establishment of the endecasÍlabo piano, with the unaccented vowel termination as alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in vocablos agudos, in masculine rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a limitation which was not justified by the genius of their language, they began by impoverishing their poetic vocabulary, and they did it in pure unintelligent imitation. The restriction was not accepted without reluctance. Rengifo, who is the Spanish Puttenham[7]—the author, that is to say, of the standard work on the mechanism of verse written in Spain in the close of the sixteenth century—even puts in a plea for the verso agudo. He had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso had dared to end a line with the word vestÍ. Boscan, who, however, is not accepted by the Spaniards as of unimpeachable authority, had been so left to himself as to end on naciÓ, while Diego de Mendoza had done the evil thing “a thousand times.” According to the stop-watch of the new school this was wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their offences in the Egemplar PoÉtico—i.e., Ars Poetica—of Juan de la Cueva.[8]

Yet Juan de la Cueba or Cueva (the b and v, being very similar in Spanish pronunciation, were constantly written for one another before the spelling was fixed) was a man not unworthy of attention. His life is covered by the obscurity common to the men of letters of the time, and on the whole more dense in Spain than elsewhere. But we know that he lived in Seville during the latter half of the sixteenth century. His Egemplar PoÉtico, though not considered as above reproach in form by Spanish critics, undoubtedly contains the orthodox poetic creed of the school, and is therefore of authority. Nothing is more striking or, when the future of poetry in the two countries is considered, more significant, than the contrast between the three verse epistles of Don Juan de la Cueva, and the Apologie for Poetrie of Sir Philip Sidney. The Egemplar is in tercets, and the Apologie in fresh youthful prose; but the work of the Englishman is all on fire with the very soul of poetic feeling, while the work of the Spaniard is a cold didactic treatise of the most mechanical kind. Sir Philip committed himself to the heresy that the essential of poetry is in the matter, the passion, and the intention, while the verse is an accident. Don Juan is spotlessly correct on the one point on which Sir Philip is heterodox. On the many on which our countryman goes to the root of the matter, the Sevillian is worse than wrong. He drops no single word to show that he thinks them worthy of consideration. A few general platitudes are to be found inculcating the wisdom of consulting your genius, the excellence of consistency and decency, the duty of despising the profanum vulgus, the folly of applying the metres and language proper to kings and great persons to the doings of common people. Then having cleared the way, he proceeds to the things really of necessity for a poet,—as that no cancion should contain more than fifteen stanzas; that a sestina is rhymed a b c, c b a, and that its lines ought to end in nouns and never in verbs; that three adjectives are more than enough for any substantive; that an agudo at the end of a hendecasyllable is the abomination of desolation; that the letter l is useful for sweetness; that r comes in with good effect “when violent Eurus opposes his rush with horrid fury to powerful Boreas”; and that s suits with soft sleep and savoury repose (“al blando sueÑo y al sabroso sosiego”), for he did not scorn alliteration’s artful aid.

It would be trivial to insist on the Egemplar PoÉtico if the author had been an insignificant man, or if the bulk of Spanish classic poetry showed that he spoke only for himself. But Juan de la Cueva has an honourable place in the history of Spanish dramatic literature among the forerunners of Lope de Vega. When he comes to write upon the comedy he rises at once above the level of mechanism and commonplace. He ceases to be a mere schoolboy to the Italians, and roundly vindicates the right of his countrymen to reject the Senecan model, to be alive, Spanish, and original on the stage, in defiance of all the rules and all the doctors. The theatre was to imitate nature, and to please. Poetry was to imitate the Italians, and satisfy the orthodox but minute critic. That is the sum and substance of Juan de la Cueva’s teaching, and therein lies the explanation of the impassable gulf which separates the Spanish drama—a very genuine thing of its kind—from Spanish classic poetry—a school exercise, redeemed from time to time by a note of patriotism or of piety.

When poetry is approached in this spirit its matter is likely to be as merely imitative as its form. Spanish classic poetry did not escape this fate, and there is only too much truth in the taunt of “sterile abundance” which has been thrown at it. We meet continually with the exasperating, nameless, characterless shadow of a lady whose “threads of gold” (which the rude vulgar call her hair) cruel hard tyrant Love has used to enchain the lamenting poet, whose sorrows just fill the correct number of stanzas. The pastoral raged. The same Tirsis and the same Chloe repeat many hundreds of times identical things in a landscape which has flowers but no flower, trees but no tree, and is withal most manifestly sham in arid, rocky Spain. Spanish critics have complained that their classic poets so seldom touched on the life of their time,—but that is a small matter. They have—piety and patriotism apart—little human reality of any kind. Love according to an Italian literary pattern, varied by platonism learnt from the Florentines, is the staple subject. Don Marcelino Menendez, the most learned of contemporary Spanish critics, has said, when controverting Ticknor’s theory that the Inquisition was accountable for the prevalence of GÓngorism, that the real explanation of that disaster lies elsewhere. Europe, he says, was invaded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by a sham middle age and a sham antiquity, which could end in nothing but verbal follies. One does not recognise the truth of this judgment in the case of France and England, but it has force as applied to Spain.

A general estimate of a school must always be difficult to justify except by a profusion of quotation, which is impossible here. We can do no more than leave it to be accepted or rejected by those who can control it by a knowledge of the original, and proceed to give such a sketch of the history of Spanish classic poetry as our limits allow.[9] It falls naturally under two heads—the Lyric and the Epic—and in both the presence of the Italian model is constant. The leading form in lyric poetry is the cancion in hendecasyllables with quebrados—that is, broken lines of seven syllables. But the EpÍstola in tercets, imitated from the capitolo of the Italians, is very common. The song proper is wholly absent. There is no “Come unto these yellow sands,” no voice of Ariel in Spanish poetry. The Spaniard does not sing; he chants.

Of the two chiefs of the school, Boscan ranks mainly by virtue of the example he set. He was somewhat harshly condemned by his follower, Herrera, for hanging jewels robbed from the classics and Italians on his own robe of frieze. The charge of plagiarism is not easily rebutted, for Boscan certainly took his goods where he found them in Virgil or Horace. As for the quality of his robe, it is undoubtedly of the nature of frieze. What strikes the reader most in Boscan is a certain worldly good sense, more like our own Queen Anne men than the poetry of a sixteenth-century school at its beginning. His most quoted piece, an EpÍstola addressed to Diego de Mendoza, is eminently rational prose disguised in verse, avowing a most heterodox affection for his wife (his whole tone to women is thoroughly modern), and a quite unpoetic liking for a good supper by a blazing fire of logs at the end of a day in the open air. But we note also the maturity of the language, in spite of a certain awkwardness due to the writer’s want of skill. "Garcilaso." This same premature and fatal maturity is even more conspicuous in Garcilaso, who was more master of his pen. In the small body of his verse, and the one fragment which remains of his prose—a letter to his friend’s wife praising her good taste for enjoying the Courtier of Castiglione—there is hardly a word or phrase which has become antiquated. This classic poetry was born with an old head on young shoulders, and had no youth. His finished form earned and kept for Garcilaso the rank of Prince of Castilian poets. In the latter part of the century he was twice edited—once at Salamanca in 1577 by the Humanist, Francisco Sanchez, called, from the name of his native town, Las Brozas, el Brocense, and best known as the author of the Minerva; and then at Seville by Hernan de Herrera. The edition of Herrera has a commentary on a large scale, and is of considerable value for the history of Spanish poetry; but it set an example which was followed to an excess of tiresome pedantry by the editors of GÓngora and Camoens. It led to a famous and not unamusing literary quarrel. The Castilian critics, who were banded in support of their own man, Sanchez, fell on Herrera with some justice for his inappropriate display of scholastic pedantry, and most unjustly for ignorance of Castilian. No Castilian will ever readily allow that an Andalusian (which Herrera was) speaks the language quite correctly. Of the matter of Garcilaso’s verse it may be said that it is pastoral, or gentlemanlike, and melancholy. The Spaniard finds, no doubt, a charm in the mere language, which of itself is enough; but even to him there may be suspected to be some tedium in this obvious determination to get a stool to be melancholy on. It is not the melancholy of Jorge Manrique, who is saddened by those eternal sorrows, death of kin and friends and the burden of life, but the melancholy of a gentleman who is imitating a model to pass the time in winter quarters. But the so-called Lira or ode, in lines of seven syllables mixed with hendecasyllabics, addressed “To the flower of Gnidus” is elegant. It is in stanzas of five lines, rhyming the first with the third, the second, fourth, and fifth together, and enforces the well-known lesson, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” for the instruction of a young lady at Naples who had not favoured the suit of one of the poet’s friends.

Only a very full history of Spanish literature could afford to dwell on Ferdinand de AcuÑa (Ferdinand, Fernando, Fernan, and Hernan are all forms of the same name, employed according to taste or local usage), who was a Portuguese noble in the service of Charles V., a soldier of distinction, a writer of Castilian verse, and a copious translator from the classics; or Gutierre de Cetina, a soldier best known by a graceful madrigal;[10] or many others whom it would be a barren display to name; but Diego Hurtado de Mendoza is too strong a man to be passed in a crowd. He is chiefly famous as a man of action—as a soldier who governed Siena for Charles V., and a diplomatist who represented the emperor in a very military fashion at the Council of Trent. In literature he ranks chiefly as the undoubted author of a history of the revolt of the Moriscoes, and as the possible, though doubtful, author of the Lazarillo de Tormes. Diego de Mendoza (1503-1575) was a younger son of the Count of Tendilla, head of one of the many titled branches of his famous house—the Douglases of Spain. He was the direct descendant of the Marquess of Santillana, and through him of that Lord of Butrago who sacrificed his life for the king at the battle of Aljubarrota.[11] His poetry was the relaxation of a great noble who broke through the rules in a fashion well calculated to horrify such critics as Juan de la Cueva. But Don Diego had fire enough in him to burn up a wilderness of correct poets of that order. Sometimes it flamed out with little regard to decency. But in happier moments—as, for instance, in the ode to Cardinal Espinosa—he could strike that note of a haughty, or even arrogant patriotism, which is the finest in Spanish poetry. Even in his case we have examples of the same premature maturity noted in Boscan. One of his epistles addressed to this very writer begins by the Horatian “Nil admirari”—an excellent maxim, perhaps, but chilling in the first youth of a poetry. Mendoza wrote not only in the Tuscan, but the native metres, couplets, and glosas. The glosa is a favourite exercise of verse-making ingenuity with the Spaniard. It consists in taking any stanza of whatever number of lines, and building on it a poem of the same number of stanzas as there are lines. Each must end in one of the lines of the foundation stanza taken in their order. They must be brought in without violence, and the whole must be a variation on the theme of the stanza quoted. Diego de Mendoza outlived Charles V., and spent his last years in exile at Granada, incurred by a too great promptitude in resenting impertinence within the precincts of the Court.

It has been the custom to divide the poets of Spain into the Castilian and the Andalusian, or those of Salamanca and those of Seville. The division is somewhat arbitrary, and corresponds to very little distinction in tone, method, or language among the writers, or at least so it seems to a foreigner who compares Luis de Leon with Hernan de Herrera, though the first is counted as the chief of the school of Salamanca, and the second as the chief of the school of Seville. Both wrote the same fine Castilian, both were good scholars, and there was the same intense religious feeling, the same high patriotism, in both. Luis Ponce de Leon (1528-1591), as if to show how artificial this distinction is, was born at Granada, which is one of the sub-kingdoms of Andalusia.[12] He was an Augustine friar, and occupied two important chairs in succession at Salamanca. Between 1572 and 1576 he was imprisoned by the Inquisition. The charge made against him was that he had translated the Song of Solomon, which, at a time when the Reformers were making an active use of the Bible in the vernacular tongues against the Church, was a serious offence. The leader of the attack on him was the Dominican Melchior Cano, of whose De Locis Theologicis Dr Johnson wrote, “Nec admiror, nec multum laudo.” It is a well-known story of Luis de Leon that when the verdict of the Holy Office was given in his favour, and he was allowed to resume his lectures, he began where he had left off, and with the words, “As we were saying yesterday, gentlemen.” His poetry may be divided into that part which is inspired by Horace, and that which is inspired by the Bible. It is perhaps only natural that he should appear to more advantage when he is paraphrasing the description of a perfect wife from the Proverbs of Solomon than when he is endeavouring to adapt the lira of Garcilaso to some theme obviously taken because it bore a certain resemblance to the subject of one of the odes of Horace. These imitations of the classic models were not confined to the graver and more reflective parts of his originals. Luis de Leon, though a churchman of undoubted piety, wrote amatory poems. The coplas in the old Spanish metres called A una DesdeÑosa—to a scornful lady—are on exactly the same subject as the already named Flor de Gnido of Garcilaso. Whether he was following the classics and learned poets of his own country, or paraphrasing the Psalms, Luis de Leon was always a master of the very purest Castilian; while his reflective poems—the Noche Serena, for instance, or the ode which imitates the Beatus Ille of Horace—are something more than mere exercises of ingenuity. It was his reputation as a stylist which secured the publication of his poems forty years after his death. Luis de Leon himself seems to have considered them only as amusements for his leisure. But in 1631 Quevedo brought out the first edition, in order to counteract the growing taste for GÓngorism.

The poet who has the honour to rank as a stylist among the Spaniards, next to, if not on an equality with Garcilaso, is Hernan de Herrera of Seville (1534-1597), a churchman of whose life almost nothing is known with certainty.[13] As usual, he published little during his life, and much of his manuscript was lost by an accident after his death. The remainder was published by his friend the painter Pacheco in 1619. Spaniards, if asked to name the pieces of verse in their language which display the greatest measure of force and dignity, would certainly quote the famous odes on the battles of Lepanto and AlcÁzar el-Quebir, together with the sonnet in honour of Don John of Austria. The vigour of these verses is unquestionable, and if it cannot be claimed for them that they display any great originality of form, they are animated by a fine spirit of patriotism. Herrera, too, had a sense of the merits of compression, which is not common with his countrymen. He worked at the language in an artistic spirit.

Once more, as in the case of the immediate followers of Garcilaso, we must pass over the names of all but the chiefs very lightly.[14] The Aragonese brothers Lupercio and BartolomÉ de Argensola, who may be classed among the poets of Castile; Francisco de Figueroa, who spent nearly all his life in Italy; Rioja, the poet of flowers, and the author of a moral poem on the Ruins of Italica (a Roman colony near Seville), inspired by Joachim du Bellay; Arguijo, and many others, must be passed over in silence. It is proper to note, however, that whatever anybody else was doing at this time, Lope de Vega did in as great quantities as men who did nothing else. But there will be occasion to speak of Lope elsewhere. For the present he must make room for the writer whom some have claimed as the most genuine lyric poet of Spain, and who bears the discredit of having flooded the literature of his country with a ruinous affectation.

Don Luis de Argote y GÓngora, who habitually used the second of these names, which was his mother’s, was a Cordovese, born in 1561.[15] He was educated at Salamanca, followed the Court for some years, and was attached to the Duke of Lerma. He took orders, and received a benefice when advanced in life, and died in his native city in 1627. His evil fame, based on the invention of the particular form of bad literature called after him GÓngorism, is greater than his good, which yet has some foundation. His romances on stories of captives among Barbary pirates, and of wars on the frontiers, are among the best of their kind. Among his earlier poems on the Tuscan models there are some which possess the lyric cry with a degree of intensity very rare among the Spaniards. The third cancion, for instance, contains a singularly passionate and admirably worded variation, on the theme of Shakespeare’s forty-fourth sonnet, “If the dull substance of my flesh were thought.” But it was not for this, the work of his earlier years, that the reputation of GÓngora has been spread over the world, but because he, to steal an image from Carlyle, swings in chains on the side of Parnassus, as the inventor of “El Culteranismo” or “GÓngorism.” At some period in his life he began to write in this style. Hostile critics say he did so because he could not attract sufficient attention by writing with sanity. Admirers have asserted that he had a literary ambition to improve the poetic language of Spain, to make it, in fact, more culto—more cultivated. The question what exactly GÓngorism was, will be best answered by an example. Here, for instance, is a passage from the Pyramus and Thisbe, a short poem, published in 1636 by his admirer Cristobal de Salazar Mardones, with a wordy commentary of incredible pomposity, and futility. The English translation is put below the Spanish on the Hamiltonian system, and the reader is begged to observe that the inversions and transpositions are only a little more violent in English than in Spanish:—

Don Cristobal de Salazar Mardones explains in prose, and with copious references to Ovid, Meta., lib. iv., that what this means is that the mulberry-tree was not torn up by the roots as a punishment by the Tigris, but was coloured by the blood of the lovers. The reader will see at once that this is puerile nonsense, and that it is a mere trick. It is also a very old trick. When Thiodolf of Hvin, whose verse riddles adorn the Heimskringla, wrote of a certain king—

he was writing in “gÓngorina especie”—that is, in what was to be the manner of GÓngora. The whole secret lay, as Lope de Vega, indeed, pointed out, in never calling anything by its right name, and in transposing words violently. Given a great deal of bad taste, and a puerile mania for making people stare, and the thing is easily accounted for. In such conditions it may be thought clever to call mead which men drink out of horns “the windless wave of the wild bull’s spear,” or to describe a mulberry-tree as a tumulus of silk, though the mistake was incomparably more excusable in Thiodolf of Hvin than in GÓngora, and the Norseman seems on the whole to have been the least silly of the two. The comparison which has been made between GÓngorism and our own metaphysical school is too favourable to the Spaniards, in whom there was absolutely nothing but juggling with words.

This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of Italian models had done. It was in vain that Lope argued against it for common-sense. He was himself conquered. Quevedo,[17] who attacked it, was driven to worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means of another affectation, the conceptista, or conceited style, which is more like our “metaphysical” manner, but never had the popularity of GÓngorism. The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis de Leon, and were free from either kind of fault; but the learned poetry of Spain had not vitality enough to throw off the disease. GÓngorism became the literary taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.

The great mass of epics, or so-called epics,[18] which form the non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain, belong with rare exceptions, if not with only one exception, to the domains of bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that I do not speak with any personal knowledge of the Carolea of HierÓnimo Sempere, published in 1560, or many others, and with only a slight acquaintance with the Carlo Famoso of Don Luis de Zapata. This second poem, published in 1565, is in 50 cantos, and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is the history of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The Carlo Famoso is essentially prose, disguised in such ottava rima stanzas as any one who had once acquired the trick could probably write as easily as prose pure and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served the emperor, had been content to tell us of what he saw in prose, he would probably have left a readable, and perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, he felt called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of Ariosto, and this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which the Don Luis de Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish, the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could. Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of Famous Men of the Indies—Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias—of Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could in a fashion write ottava rima stanza. He seems to have thought that “Elegy” meant much the same thing as “Eulogy,” and his Elegias are, in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crown octavo volume of 563 pages in double columns. Of course there are by the side of work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious or humorous, which have no pretensions to a historical character. Here it was only to be expected that Lope de Vega would be among the most fluent and the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The epics in the Italian form being popular, he wrote several; and as he had an unparallelled command of facile verse which always stopped short of becoming bad, he is never unreadable, though, as he was also only a very superior improvisatore, his poems never quite compel reading. The subject of the Dragontea—the last cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in 1594—is so much more attractive to an Englishman than the Angelicas and Jerusalem Conquistadas, taken from Ariosto and Tasso, that one is perhaps prejudiced in its favour. And yet it seems to me to have a certain vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means inferior to them in other respects.[20]

The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-natured acquiescence of foreigners have given the name of epic to the Araucana of Alonso de Ercilla.[21] The author was a very typical Spaniard of his century. He was born in 1533, and came to England as page to Philip of Spain at the time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from England that he sailed to Chili for the purpose of helping in the suppression of the revolt of the Araucans, which, became the subject of his poem. While on service he was condemned to death for drawing his sword on a brother officer. The sentence was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the Marquis of CaÑete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared in three parts in 1569, 1575, and 1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the Araucana can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen for himself. The first part is almost wholly occupied with the skirmishes of the Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the tyranny of a fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of ottava rima stanzas, he wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality. Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior version of the Varones Ilustres of Castellanos, at its weakest an echo of the Italians. The literature of the world would have been richer, not poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French contemporary Monluc.

The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the pre-eminence which mediÆval French had had among neighbouring peoples. Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian—even Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a world-wide reputation.”

It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges have felt for the Lusiads.[23] The pathetic circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580), are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the Lusiads is supplied by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope; but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which has been claimed for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied—and no one need wish to deny—that Camoens wrote his own language with great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the Lusiads suffer from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us endure its essential absurdity. The Lusiads has, in fact, the defect of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula—that it is very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]

The reader who compares the Lusiads, not with the FaËrie Queen, which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature, but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs, the purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud calls made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, ottava rima, full of matter which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages. Now and then he will find incidents—the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of Love—where the intention to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity, and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again there are better and more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was a real poet, though of no wide scope, who could express a certain tenderness and melancholy in forms he had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his great name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his country can quote as worthy to rank with the great poets of the world. Therefore he has a whole nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned to contradict.[25]