History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)

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]

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.”

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]

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]

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.

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]

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.

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]

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:—

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]

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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

END OF VOL. II.