The French literature of Columbus' Century is but little, if at all, below that of Italy in world influence and interest. It was ushered in by that alluring character, the vagabond poet, Villon. He was twenty the first year of our century, and having, providentially for the world of literature, escaped hanging, wrote poetry that has always attracted the attention of poets of every land, and besides has had a popular vogue whenever men have looked beyond their own time and country for literary interests. Few poets of modern times have had among the educated of all countries so many ardent admirers--devotees they might well be called--as Villon. The power of expression of the Renaissance that was just opening was incarnate in him, and no one has ever said better what he sang, though his message was limited enough. His "Ladies of the Olden Time," probably addressed in its epilogue to Prince Charles of Orleans, his poetic contemporary, to whom it is said that he owed his being saved from hanging, is the best known, and is a typical example of his work which reveals the reason for its enduring qualities:
With Villon came Prince Charles of Orleans, of whom we would probably know very little except for the fact that twenty years of imprisonment in an English prison gave him the opportunity for devotion to poetry. His beautiful lines on the death of his wife are a chef-d'oeuvre of mourning poetry and one of the gems of literature. The Prince's appeal to Death as to what has made Fate so bold as to take the noble Princess, who was his comfort, his life, his good, his pleasure, his richness, demanding why it had not rather taken himself, has been often translated. There is another of his little poems addressed to her which has often been quoted and yet cannot be quoted too often:
One of Clement Marot's shorter poems contains his formula for what constitutes happiness in life. It is the same formula that has been in the mouths of all the poets at all times who have cared to express themselves on the subject, though some critics have been unkind enough to say that it was not always in their hearts--"Happy the man whose mind and care a few paternal acres share." Marot goes somewhat more into detail. His poem is an anticipation of the sonnet of the great master printer of Antwerp, Christopher Plantin, at the end of this century. Because of its many associations it deserves a place here:
Francis I was himself a poet, and his poems and letters were collected and published in the first half of the nineteenth century. "In default of a great talent, he had a real passion for poetry," says Imbert de Saint-Amand, and like the Trouvères he liked to make use of the lyre and sword by turns. Sainte-Beuve in his "Portraits Littéraires" declared that "Francis I, from the day he ascended the throne, gave the signal for this puissant labor which was to aid in expanding and definitely polishing the French language. Thanks to the impulse given by him from above, there was soon a universal {465} clearing of the ground all around him." The verses in which he formulated one of the most melancholy and most striking judgments that ever monarch pronounced on the nothingness of the grandeurs of this lower world, deserve to be quoted:
The most important writer in France at this time, however, was undoubtedly Francis' sister, Margaret of Navarre or Angoulême. Her "Heptameron" has been widely read in practically every generation since her own, and though some doubt has been thrown on her authorship of it, it is probable that the age-long attribution to her must remain. The book is about as evil in its influence as any that was ever written. Its author was undoubtedly a saint. She had the best of intentions, and her work illustrates how easy it is for good intentions to go wrong. Hell was paved with good intentions then as now. As I have suggested in the chapter on Some Great Women of the Century, a corresponding mistake is being made by many good women now in the crusade of providing sex information as a protection for the young. Margaret's work is one of the best specimens of French prose of the time. Saintsbury, in his volume on "The Early Renaissance," calls it a very remarkable book which has, as a rule, been undervalued, "presenting almost equal attractions for those who read for mere amusement, to those who appreciate literature as literature, and to those who like extra literary puzzles of various kinds from authorship to allusion."
Margaret's reputation has suffered more than was deserved from the condemnation of the "Heptameron." Her personality merits to be judged rather from the charming poetry of a {466} mystical character which she wrote. Her book, "Les Marguerites de la Marguerite des Princesses," is too well known to be much more than mentioned here. It has a charming grace and an exquisite delicacy. It is the true index to her character. As Imbert de Saint-Amand has said in his "Women of the Valois Court," "Poetry and religion were her two consolers." Her resolution when she looked at her crucifix and burst into poetry was:
There are bursts of piety in her collection worthy of her great mystical contemporary, St. Teresa. The following would almost remind one of St. Teresa's cry, "I die that I may die."
The French poetess, Louise Labé, la cordière, the cord-wainer's wife, as she was called, in reference to her husband's occupation, deserves a place because she represents at once the opportunities even of the lowly born of her sex for the higher education at this time, and her writings exhibit a natural grace and ardent passion that place them in a high rank of lyric poetry. Poetesses of passion there have been a-plenty since, {467} yet it is doubtful if many of them have surpassed much the French lady of the Renaissance from the middle classes. The sonnet form would seem highly unsuitable to us for such passionate expression, but it was the fashion to use it, and Louise Labé anticipates by some three hundred years Mrs. Browning's use of this form for a very similar purpose. One of her sonnets may very well be read beside some of those of Mrs. Browning.
The humor of the end of Columbus' Century is very well illustrated in some of the epigrams of Melin de Saint Gelais, like Marot, the son of a poet and brought up in poetic circles, who knew how to write elegant trivialities, or who was, as the French say, maître en l'art de badiner avec élégance. Curiously enough, it was he who imported the sonnet from Italy. It had been hitherto unknown to French poets, but was unfortunately, as it must seem to most of us, destined to eclipse the ballades, rondeaux, virelais and other poetic forms that had been for so long in vogue in France. I prefer to quote here two of his shorter epigramatic poems which serve to show how old the new is in wit and humor:
The second treats in vivid satire the eternal question of the honor due the scholar:
The "Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française," which is the manifesto of the Pleiades, was written by Joachim du Bellay just at the end of Columbus' Century and published in February, 1550, according to the modern calendar, but 1549 in the old, which made the year begin on Lady Day (March 25). With that a group of men, most of them about twenty-five years of age, entered upon a new period of French literature. A sham middle age had been lingering on,--the mere remnants and echo of the Romance of the Rose, and now a new spirit was to enter into French literature. The genius of it had all been cradled in Columbus' Century. The poets of the Pleiades came to teach the modern note. Pierre Ronsard was the greatest of them, and in five years all Europe knew something of the new birth in French poetry. Two such very different minds as those of Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth of England became ardent admirers and indeed almost patrons of the new poets, and particularly of Ronsard. Many of the poems had been conceived, and some of the best were issued within a year or two after the close of what we have called Columbus' Century. The little lyric Mignonne! Allons voir si la Rose," which has always been a favorite in every generation with any poetry in its soul, was known throughout Europe within a year of its publication in 1552.
There is another ode of Ronsard's of much more serious vein which serves to show that the poets of the older time could think of other things besides love and beauty and the rose, and face the sterner problems of their time and sing the {469} meaning of them with poetic depth. Because its subject is quite as eternal in its interest as that of the love poems and has perhaps more significance for our time, I prefer to quote it:
Joachim du Bellay, snatched away at the early age of thirty-five after having passed many years in illness, owed his inspiration to write poetry to his reading of the classics. It was he who wrote the proclamation of the Pleiades which I have already mentioned. Had his fate been happier, doubtless there {470} would have been many great poems from him and he would have been a serious rival of his friend Ronsard. As it is, there are from his pen some poems that will always have an interest for the French and for the educated in every country. One of the more serious deserves to be quoted.
In the French prose of our century there is Comines at the beginning, a not unworthy fourth in that wonderful quartette of French historical writers which began with Villehardouin at the end of the twelfth century, gave us Joinville in the thirteenth, Froissart in the fourteenth and Comines in the latter half of the fifteenth. He is one of the historians who will ever be read; with a political sagacity and philosophic outlook on history that give him a place of his own. He was no mere chronicler, and the individuality of his work, that quality by which history is raised into literature, sets him far above many a modern writer of what is called history, though it is merely a collection of materials for some historian who will inform them with a soul. At the end of the century there was Michel de L'Hôpital, whose orations, numerous memoirs and special treatises mainly connected with explanations of {471} law have the defects of legal writing at all times, and yet exhibit a power of expression that has seldom been equalled at any time.
After Rabelais, undoubtedly the greatest of the prose writers of the time was Amyot, whose first work, a translation of a Greek romance, "Théagène et Chariclé," was published in 1546, and who, in the subsequent years of a life that reached almost to ninety, published his translations of Plutarch, a work for which he received the designation of preceptor of the royal children and the Bishopric of Auxerre. He was the grand almoner.
Amyot's translation of Plutarch has been declared practically a new and original work. Montaigne said of it:
"I am grateful to Amyot above all things for having had the wit to select so worthy and so suitable a work to present his country. We ignorant folk had been lost, had not this lifted us out of the mire; thanks to it, we now dare speak and write, and ladies give lessons out of it to school-masters; 'tis our breviary." For English-speaking people its significance is greatly enhanced from the consideration that it was really Amyot's version which, in the English dress of Florio, became Shakespeare's Plutarch. Anyone who knows how closely Shakespeare followed his Plutarch will appreciate, then, what an important influence on world literature Amyot was destined to have.
This translation of Plutarch has come to be looked upon as probably one of the best translations ever made. It has sometimes been said that "to translate is to betray" and that the best translations are at most tapestries seen from the wrong side, but Amyot's "Plutarch" must be considered an exception to this rule. Erasmus said of Linacre's translation into Latin of Galen that it was better than the original Greek. Amyot's "Plutarch" has become a French classic, though the Greek author was by no means classic in the limited sense of the word in the original. Racine would read no other because he thought there was nothing to equal it in French. Amyot's works are a treasure house of the French language, and modern French critics often regret that many of his expressions have been allowed to sink into desuetude.
France glories in the possession of another of these striking characters of the Renaissance period, Rabelais, about the estimation of whose character and place in history, just as with regard to Machiavelli, the world has not quite made up its mind. There is no doubt at all as to his genius, nor his breadth of view and comprehensive grasp of the knowledge of his time, nor of his ability as a vigorous writer, though his crudities of style and frequent indulgence in vulgarity, have made him a writer largely for men, and even many of these have been deterred from the study of his writings because of the glaringness of these faults. His defects were largely those of his time, for they were accustomed to call a spade a spade in the Renaissance. It was not because of looseness of his own life that his crudities of style are so manifest. Careful investigations and research in our time have made it very clear that there are many misunderstandings with regard to his personal character which should be removed. Rabelais ran the whole gamut of life in his time. He was first a friar, then a monk, took his medical degrees at Montpellier, a physician who gained considerable prestige for his knowledge of medicine, a writer of books that were widely read, a scholar whose journeys to Rome gave him a breadth of knowledge unusual even in his time, and the intimate friend of some of the great and good churchmen and literary men of his time.
The old legend which represented him as a gluttonous and wine-bibbing buffoon, wandering in revels as an unfrocked priest, must now be abandoned. His transitions from friar to monk, to physician, were all accomplished with due ecclesiastical permission, and in spite of the freedom of speech and liberalizing tendencies to be found in his writings he never got into serious trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities. Evidently he was looked upon as a genius whose good will might be depended on to keep him from serious heretical divagations, though occasionally his superabundant vital spirit would lead him into expressions that were often indiscreet and sometimes needed correction. His relations with Guillaume and Jean du Bellay and with the bishops of Maillezais and Montpellier, as well as the distinguished jurist, Tiraqueau, furnish most convincing proof of the high regard in which he was held not {473} only by men of his own rank, but by those far above him in power and station--Princes of the Church and patrons of humanism.
In spite of their deterring vulgarity, his works have been much read ever since and are still often in the hands of scholars and those who want to appreciate one phase at least of the true inwardness and all-comprehensiveness of the spirit of the Renaissance. The number of Greek and Latin writers from whom he quotes is very large, and his reading must have been very wide. He seems also to have known some Hebrew. Very few of his contemporaries realized at all that in his writings he had made an enduring contribution not only to French, but to world literature. So good a critic, however, as Joachim du Bellay in the "Defence and Illustration of the French Tongue" alludes to him as the man "who has brought back Aristophanes to life and who imitates so well the satirical wit of Lucian."
The fact that his book should be published at this time without its author incurring serious censure, much less persecution, is a proof that the usual persuasion of many who write on the history of this time that heresy-baiting was a favorite occupation of the Churchmen is unfounded and shows how absurd is the impression entertained by not a few that the slightest imprudence might have even fatal consequences. Men like Étienne Dolet and Giordano Bruno lost their lives at this time on heretical charges, but that was because their writings seemed to the Church, and above all the civil authorities of the time, to undermine authority and to propagate anarchy. This has always been a dangerous suspicion for a philosophic writer to fall under at any time, and is not without its serious dangers, social rather than legal, even in our time. In other matters, however, as the example of Rabelais shows, there was, if not a modern liberty, at least a large tolerance of expression, provided the thoughts were tempered by humor and the character of the writer known to be such that genuine ill-will or anarchic tendencies towards civil and ecclesiastical authorities were not the manifest purpose of the writings.
The interest of our own generation in Rabelais is best {474} illustrated by the foundation in 1902 of the Société des Études Rabelaisiennes at Paris. The organ of the Society, the Revue des Études Rabelaisiennes, made its first appearance in January, 1903, and has already added much to our knowledge of Rabelais. It has now been thoroughly demonstrated that Gargantua was a popular and folk-lore character long before Rabelais' time, and that he assumed the character only in order to give popular vogue to his own ideas. In spite of the cruder side of his work he has so much to say that is valuable with regard to education, valuable even for our time, so much of correction of popular errors and emphatic restatement of the philosophy of life by which men may secure their happiness, not through selfishness, but love for their fellowmen, that whenever men think deeply for themselves and do not merely drift in the wake of other thinkers, Rabelais will always attract attention. It is always a good sign when Rabelais becomes popular in France, for men are usually thinking more deeply than before. Like Dante, he is a touchstone of sincerity and honesty of thought and purpose among his countrymen.
Rabelais is a most difficult man to sum up for those who are not French. Saintsbury in his "Earlier Renaissance" has perhaps furnished the best brief appreciation when he said:
"On the pure credit side his (Rabelais') assets are so great that one can only marvel at the undervaluation of them by any competent auditor. . . . You may say some things against him, and some of these some things truly. But three things will remain. He is (let the competent gainsay it if they dare) one of the greatest writers of the world; he is one of the great satirists of the world; and he is--as not all great writers and very few great satirists have been--one who sincerely and strenuously loved his fellowmen."
In the first paragraph of his "François Rabelais" [Footnote 45] (written for the French Men of Letters Series), Arthur Tilley, whose "Literature of the French Renaissance" had shown how competent he was to judge, has summed up the character and place of Rabelais. It is to Tilley that I owe most of the {475} details that are given here, and his paragraph will serve as a fitting conclusion.
[Footnote 45: Lippincott, Phila., 1907.]
"It is a characteristic of the very greatest writers that they sum up, with more or less completeness, the thought, the aspirations, and the temper of their age, and this not only for their own country, but for the whole civilized world. Of this select band is Rabelais. He is the embodiment not only of the early French Renaissance, but of the whole Renaissance in its earlier and fresher manifestations, in its devotion to humanism, in its restless and many-sided curiosity, in its robust enthusiasm, in its belief in the future of the human race."
The Spanish literature of the period contains some all-important material of great significance not only for Spanish literature itself, but also for the literature of the world. In the chapter on Women of the Renaissance, I have called attention to the interest of Queen Isabella in things literary, and while she did not produce any formal literary work, her letters have been pronounced by the Spanish Academy classic documents in the Spanish language. The most important contribution to Spanish literature during the century came also from a woman, though she doubtless had as little thought of making literature when she wrote as did the Queen. This was St. Teresa, to whose works serious writers on spiritual subjects in all countries and at all times, often in spite of differences of belief, have turned as classics of spirituality. Her literary work consists of the treatises which she wrote by order of her confessors on mystical subjects and then her many letters. It is these last, particularly, that have been widely read in the modern time and that are world classics in their order. Probably no one has been more misunderstood than St. Teresa. She has come to be considered by many, who, as a rule, know nothing at all of her at first hand, as one of the almost impossible saintly personages whose hours of concentration in prayer and fasting and other mortifications have driven them into states of mind bordering on the irrational, if not frankly hysterical. Indeed she is often considered to be the most striking type of these.
FRANCIA, VIRGIN WEEPING OVER BODY OF CHRIST (LONDON)
David Hannay, in his "The Later Renaissance" in Professor Saintsbury's series, Periods of European Literature (New York: Scribner's, 1898), who has read her works with care, says: "Her letters, which are not only the most attractive part of her writing, but even the most valuable, show her {477} not only as a great saint, but as a great lady with a very acute mind, a fine wit and an abounding good sense. Her own great character is stamped on every line. Nobody ever showed less of the merely emotional saintly character 'meandering about, capricious, melodious, weak, at the will of devout whim mainly.'"
To get the real charm of St. Teresa's writings, one must read her letters, and from those it is almost impossible to take such selections as might be included in the brief space allowed here. Fortunately they have come to us as she wrote them. Fray Luis de Leon was himself literary enough to save them from a worthy father-confessor, who would have "improved upon and polished her periods." The world came near losing the marvellous language of which Crashaw said, "Oh it is not Spanish, but it is Heaven she spoke."
Some idea of her simplicity and power of expression can be appreciated from the "Hymn to Christ Crucified," familiar to English readers in Dryden's version, which has been attributed also to St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Francis Xavier, but which seems more appropriately ascribed to the Seraphic Mother of Crashaw's burning words, "sweet incendiary," "undaunted daughter of desires" and "fair sister of the seraphin." The poem is, no matter who may have been its author, at least a striking example of the style of the time.
The most original contribution of Spain to pure literature were the Tales of Chivalry, which became so popular at the end of the fifteenth century. "Amadis de Gaul" is claimed by the French, but the French original has been lost and the Spanish one is not only well known, but characteristically Spanish, partaking of the very temper of the people. The first known edition is early in the sixteenth century, and within fifty years Spain produced twelve editions of it. A whole series of books of similar kind followed it. Many of these were totally lacking in literary quality, but they achieved popularity. Our own first novelists were literary folk. They have been succeeded by hack writers, who watch the fashion of the moment and make ever so much more money and sell ever so many more copies than did the great novelists. Something like this happened in Spain. These tales of chivalry have sometimes been made a matter of reproach to the intelligence of the Spaniards of the time, but then what shall we say of our own much more widespread occupation with stories if possible more trivial and absurd?
We are not without tributes from distinguished men to the interest they found in some of these stories. The "Palmerin de Inglaterra" which Cervantes' priest "would have kept in such a casket as that which Alexander found among Darius' spoils intended to guard the works of Homer," attracted so much attention from Edmund Burke that he avowed in the House of Commons that he had spent much time over it. Dr. Johnson confessed to having spent the leisure hours of a summer upon "Felixmarte de Hircania." "Amadis de Gaul" classed by Cervantes' barber as "the best in that kind," is perhaps the only one of the tales of chivalry that a man need read. The usual assumption that it is a story of France, because of the word Gaul, is quite mistaken. Amadis is a British Knight, Gaul stands for Wales, Vindilisora is Windsor, while Bristol becomes Bristoya. The action occurs "not many years after the Passion of our Redeemer." There are marvellous adventures, something happens on every page, {479} combats with giants, magical spells of all kinds, miracles, hair-breadth escapes, last-moment rescues, till fidelity is rewarded and Amadis marries Oriana, daughter of the King of Britain, and they all live happy ever after.
After the Tales of Chivalry came the Novelas de Picaros, picaresque novels we have called these Tales of Roguery in English. The two modes of fiction represent the opposite extremes. The tales of chivalry were almost entirely imaginary. The picaresque novels were rather naturalistic studies from low life. The first of these was the "Celestina" but the one that was most influential is the "Lazarillo de Tormes," which curiously enough has been attributed, though on dubious evidence, to the famous Diego Hurtado de Mendoza and also to Fray Juan de Ortega of the Order of St. Jerome. The stories represent the ever-recurring tendency of mankind to be interested in a rogue, to be ready to laugh at his rascalities and especially his capacity for cheating his betters that has been used so effectively by Plautus and was the germ of the idea in the plot of Gil Bias and Scarron and probably suggested Shakespeare's "Jack Falstaff." There are phases of our modern fiction that display the same tendency.
Fitzmaurice Kelly in his "Spanish Literature" (Appleton's Literatures of the World Series, New York, 1898) said of the "Lazarillo de Tormes":
"After three hundred years, it survives all its rivals, and may be read with as much edification and amusement as on the day of its first appearance. It set a fashion, a fashion that spread to all countries, and finds a nineteenth century manifestation in the pages of 'Pickwick'; but few of its successors match it in satirical humor, and none approach it in pregnant concision, where no word is superfluous, and where every word tells with consummate effect. Whoever wrote the book, he fixed forever the type of the comic prose epic as rendered by the needy, and he did it in such wise as to defy all competition."
By a very curious contrast, the literature of Spanish origin from this century which has most influenced the world, being translated into all the languages and read and studied deeply, is exactly the opposite pole of these prose epics. For the {480} world's best-known writers on spirituality and mysticism have been Spaniards, the greatest of them lived at this time and they are still being read everywhere, edition after edition appearing in many languages. The great names among the mystics whose writings were either completed during our century, or at least the foundation for whose work was laid because their authors came to their maturity during this time, were John of Avila, Luis de Granada and Luis de Leon. John of Avila is the best known of these and occupied something of the position of master to the others. His most famous book, "The Spiritual Treatise," is still widely read in religious institutions and is familiar to all those who have made any serious study of the religious life. As there are and have been ever since his time hundreds of thousands of religious in the world, many of them representing the highest culture and good taste, "the apostle of Andalusia," as he was called, has had a large circle of chosen readers for all these centuries. His book is written with an ardent eloquence in the deeply spiritual passages, and as Hannay has said, "has always a large share of the religious quality of unction." There are many profoundly intelligent and seriously thoughtful men of our time who consider it one of the most wonderful books ever written.
Luis de Granada's book, "The Guide for Sinners," was translated into all the languages of Europe and read not only by the clergy, but by the people. His book of "Prayer and Meditation on the Principal Mysteries of Faith" was much more in the hands of the clergy and religious, but was scarcely less famous. Luis de Leon's "Perfecta Casada" gained a wide reputation, and his other books on "The Names of Christ" and "The Book of Job" had a place in every important religious community in Europe.
Two names in the Spanish poetry of this period are immortal in Spain, and their writings are familiar to the students of literature the world over. They are Boscan and Garcilaso de la Vega. The younger man, Garcilaso, sent Castiglione's "Il Cortigiano" to Boscan and suggested its translation into Spanish. Fitzmaurice Kelly, in his "Spanish Literature," has said, "Though Boscan himself held translation to be a thing {481} meet for 'men of small parts,' his rendering is an almost perfect performance." This led Boscan to put into Spanish form many other Italian pieces, not so much by translation as by imitation more suited to the genius of the Spanish language. Not a great genius, not a lordly versifier, endowed with not one supreme gift, Boscan ranks as an unique instance in the annals of literature by virtue of his enduring and irrevocable victory.
Garcilaso, his young friend, is far ahead of him in poetic genius. He was a soldier-poet, "taking now the sword and now the pen," as he said himself, and he died at the early age of thirty-three. His death occurred as the leader of a storming party in romantic circumstances, under the eye of the Emperor and the army. The first to climb the breach, he fell mortally wounded into the arms of the future translator of Ariosto and of his more intimate friend, the Marques de Lombay, whom the world knows best as St. Francis Borgia. "His illustrious descent, his ostentatious valor, his splendid presence, his seductive charm, his untimely death: all these, joined to his gift of song, combined to make him the hero of legend and the idol of a nation. Like Sir Philip Sidney, Garcilaso personified all accomplishments and all graces." Curiously enough it is not the martial but the pastoral that Garcilaso sings and "the light that never was on land or sea," of peace with poetic melancholy, that may so easily be the subject of criticism, yet has always been the favorite retreat of a great many poets at many recurring times.
At the Western end of the Spanish Peninsula the Portuguese, distinct in language, had a literature of their own which reached its perfection just after Columbus' Century, but the promise of which can be seen during our period. The greatest of their poets is Camöens, whom the German critic Schlegel did not hesitate to place above not only his two great contemporaries of the sixteenth century, Ariosto and Tasso, but above all the modern epic poets and even above Virgil. His poem has been read in translation in all the languages of Europe. While it was not written in what we have called Columbus' Century, the poet had given evidence of the greatness of his genius before 1550, and some of the sonnets of his {482} early years have deservedly been looked upon as worthy perhaps of a place among the greatest examples in that form. Mrs. Browning's reason for calling her "Sonnets from the Portuguese" by that name was that probably the most beautiful love sonnets in the world had been written in that language. The Portuguese language was given the form in which it was to survive at this time, and it is always when a language is being formed that somehow geniuses come to round out its powers of expression and at the same time give it the form which it is to maintain partly as a consequence of their genius having expressed itself in it in certain enduring modes.
Some of the shorter poems written by Camöens when he was a young man between twenty and twenty-five, that is, before the close of Columbus' Century, are so characteristic of the vers de société at all times, and yet are such delightful bits of versification with here and there a touch of charming poetic quality, that they have more than passing interest for the modern time. I venture to quote several of them to illustrate their variety, but at the same time because, though all are attributed to Camöens, it is doubtful whether some of them were not written by others and afterwards transferred to him because of his greater fame. They illustrate very well the poetic vein of the Portuguese of the time, though ordinarily it is not assumed that Portugal was touched by the spirit of the Renaissance to any great degree or that her literature is of any significance. Most of them are with regard to love, though not all of them are as serious as the rondeau so often quoted:
In lighter vein is the canzonet to the lady who swore by her eyes, a custom which was rather common according to the tales of chivalry so popular shortly before this time. The first and last stanza will give a good idea of it:
At times the Portuguese poet could be rather serious. The two stanzas from the beginning of a canzonet, which contrasts the making of money with the doing of good as the proper aim of life, has often been quoted:
The poet is said to have fallen in love with a maid of honor at the court far above him in rank. For this impudence, he was banished from court, and unable to live so near, yet so far, resolved to go as a soldier to Africa. Somehow or other a {484} last meeting with her (she died at the early age of twenty) was managed before his departure, and he discovered in her eyes, as she bade him good-bye, the secret that she was as deeply in love as he. He went where duty called, fought bravely, losing the sight of an eye in one of the battles, and, loaded with martial honor, was permitted to return to court. When he returned, his inamorata was no more. The sonnet written when he learned the sad news is more artificial perhaps than he would have written in his maturity, but it and others gave Portuguese literature the fame for love sonnets which suggested to Mrs. Browning the title "Sonnets from the Portuguese" for her love poems:
The literature of the Spanish peninsula was to have its flourishing period in the century following that we have called after Columbus, but there is enough of enduring literary products to show that men's minds were deeply affected by the great spirit of the time and to lay broad and deep foundations for the Golden Age of Spanish literature that was to follow so soon.
The English literature of Columbus' Century obtained some of its triumphs very early in the period in a literary department, that of dramatics, in which other nations achieved little success. England in the latter part of the fifteenth century produced a series of plays whose high place in literature was only recognized properly during the past two or three generations. Ordinarily it is assumed that dramatic literature of serious significance did not develop in any modern language until much later than this time. Indeed, as a rule, the English drama of Shakespeare's time is supposed to be the first development of any importance in this department. The Spanish drama developed almost immediately after our Shakespearean period, the French came half a century later, and curiously enough Italy and Germany did not develop a national drama until the nineteenth century. The mystery and morality plays of the latter half of the fifteenth century in England have been revived in recent years and have illustrated beyond all doubt the genius of their authors and the fine evolution of drama at this time. Specimens that have been played in many places, in public performances, have proved to possess a gripping power over audiences, surpassing the dramatic literature of our own time, and the dramatic ability and genius of the men who wrote them has now come to be generally recognized.
"Everyman," for instance, has been played to crowded houses in many of the large cities of the country, audiences listening intently for the two hours without an intermission and then paying the highest possible tribute by going out always in silence. The story is only a dramatic rendition of the place in life of the "four last things to be remembered"--death, judgment, heaven and hell--of interest to every man. Such a subject would seem to be quite out of harmony {486} with the temper of our time and above all with the mood in which our people attend the theatre. The man who wrote it and was able to give it such enduring interest was a dramatic genius of the first order, for he was able to take the familiar things of life, even those to which men are not prone to give much attention, and make them compelling.
Mystery plays have come to have much more significance for us since the wide popularity of the Passion Play at Oberammergau. Thousands of people go up to the little village of scarcely more than a thousand inhabitants every ten years to see and hear the simple villagers tell the old, old story of the Passion and Death of Him that died on the Cross for us. Some, perhaps, of the attendance is due to the fact that it has become a fad to go, yet most of it is a real act of devotion, but to a shrine that is literary and truly dramatic as well as religious. From all over the world people have flocked to it and have confessed the dramatic force of the story in its simple setting in such a way as to make us realize what a powerful appeal the old mystery plays must have had for the people of the later Middle Ages when they came to their perfection of presentation. The appeal that the Passion Play had to the older folk, the Nativity Plays had for the children, though also for their elders and especially the women.
It is exactly during Columbus' Century that these mystery and morality plays reached their highest development and greatest perfection of expression and presentation. In England this development proved to be the fertile field out of which sprang the great Elizabethan dramatic literature. There are all the elements of a great dramatic literature in them. There is simplicity and directness with the presentation of subjects that have the highest appeal and yet very humanly done, so that wit, and above all, humor, has its role, and the problems concerned are those which interest all mankind. So little is known about this phase of dramatic literature, though it represents such a charmingly simple expression of dramatic poetry, containing a lesson of sincerity, naturalness and occupation with the higher things, which our generation needs above all in order to be lifted out of the rut of over-attention to problem plays, that some review of it seems necessary not {487} only for a complete picture of the literature of Columbus' time, but also for the sake of the enduring social significance of this early dramatic literature.