Ayala's verse, the conscious effort of deliberate artistry, contrasts with those popular romances which can be divined through the varnish of the sixteenth century. Few, if any, of the existing ballads date from Ayala's time; and of the nineteen hundred printed in Durán's Romancero General the merest handful is older than 1492, when Antonio de Nebrija examined their structure in his Arte de la Lengua Castellana. Yet the older romances were numerous and long-lived enough to supplant the cantares de gesta, against which chronicles and annals made war by giving the same epical themes with more detail and accuracy. In turn these chronicles afforded subjects for romances of a later day. An illustration suffices to prove the point. Every one knows the spirited close of the first in order of Lockhart's Ancient Spanish Ballads:—
The original is founded on Pedro de Corral's Crónica de Don Rodrigo (chapters 207, 208), which was not written till 1404, and from the same source (chapters 238-244) comes the substance of Lockhart's second ballad:—
The modernity of almost every piece in Lockhart's collection were as easily proved; but it is more important at this point to turn from the popular song-makers to the new school of writers which was forming itself upon foreign models.
Representative of these innovations is the grandson of Enrique II., Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), upon whom posterity has conferred a marquisate which he never possessed in life.[5] His first production is said to have been a set of coplas written, as Master of the Order of Calatrava, for the royal feasts at Zaragoza in 1414; his earliest known work is his Arte de trovar (Art of Poetry), given in the same year at the Consistory of the Gay Science at Barcelona. Villena, of whose treatise mere scraps survive, shows minute acquaintance with the works of early trovadores; of general principles he says naught, losing himself in discursive details. Early in 1417 followed the Trabajos de Hércules (Labours of Hercules), first written in Catalan by request of Pero Pardo, and done into Castilian in the autumn of the year. This tedious allegory, crushed beneath a weight of pedantry, is unredeemed by ingenuity or fancy, and the style is disfigured by violent and absurd inversions which bespeak long, tactless study of Latin texts. Juan Manuel's dignified restraint is lost on his successor, itching to flaunt inopportune learning with references to Aristotle, Aulus Gellius, and St. Jerome. In 1423, at the instance of Sancho de Jaraba, Villena wrote his twenty chapters on carving—the Arte cisoria, an epicure's handbook to the royal table, compact of curious counsels and recipes expounded with horrid eloquence by a pedant who tended to gluttony. Still odder is the Libro de Aojamiento (Dissertation on the Evil Eye) with its three "preventive modes," as recommended by Avicenna and his brethren. Translations of Dante and Cicero are lost, and three treatises on leprosy, on consolation, and on the Eighth Psalm are valueless. Villena piqued himself on being the first in Spain—he might perhaps have said the first anywhere—to translate the whole Æneid; but he marches to ruin with his mimicry of Latin idioms, his abuse of inversion, and his graces of a cart-horse in the lists. No contemporary was more famed for universal accomplishment; so that, while he lived, men held him for a wizard, and, when he died, applauded the partial burning of his books by Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Segovia, who put the rest to his private uses. Santillana and Juan de Mena assert that Villena wrote Castilian verse, and Baena implies as much; if so, he was probably a common poetaster, the loss of whose rhymes is a stroke of luck. A Castilian poem on the labours of Hercules, ascribed to him by Pellicer, is a rank forgery. Measured by his repute, Villena's works are disappointing. But if we reflect that he translated Dante, that he strove to naturalise successful foreign methods, and that in his absurdest moments he proves his susceptibility to new ideas, we may explain his renown and his influence. Nor did these end with his life; for Lope de Vega, Alarcón, Rojas Zorrilla, and Hartzenbusch have brought him on the boards, and he has appealed with singular force to the imaginations of both Quevedo and Larra.
To Villena's time belong two specimens of the old encyclopædic school: the Libro de los Gatos, translated from the Narrationes of the English monk, Odo of Cheriton; and the Libro de los Enxemplos of Clemente Sánchez of Valderas, whose seventy-one missing stories were brought to light in 1878 by M. Morel-Fatio. Sánchez' collection, thus completed, shows the entrance into Spain of the legend of Buddha's life, adapted by some Christian monk from the Sanskrit Lalita-Vistara, and popular the world over as the Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. The style is carefully modelled on Juan Manuel's manner.
The Cancionero de Baena, named after the anthologist Juan Alfonso de Baena above mentioned, contains the verses of some sixty poets who flourished during the reign of Juan II., or a little earlier. This collection, first published in 1851, mirrors two conflicting tendencies. The old Galician school is represented by Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino (sometimes called de Illescas), a copious, foul-mouthed ruffian, with gusts of inspiration and an abiding mastery of technique. To the same section belong the Archdeacon of Toro, a facile versifier, and Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, whose name is inseparable from that of Macías, El Enamorado. Macías has left five songs of slight distinction, and, as a poet, ranks below Rodríguez de la Cámara. Yet he lives on the capital of his legend, the type of the lover faithful unto death, and the circumstances of his passing are a part of Castilian literature. The tale is (but there are variants), that Macías, once a member of Villena's household, was imprisoned at Arjonilla, where a jealous husband slew the poet in the act of singing his platonic love. Quoted times innumerable, this more or less authentic story of Macías' end ensured him an immortality far beyond the worth of his verses: it fired the popular imagination, and enters into literature in Lope de Vega's Porfiar hasta morir and in Larra's El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente.
A like romantic memory attaches to Macías' friend, Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (also called Rodríguez del Padrón), the last poet of the Galician school, represented in Baena's Cancionero by a single cántica. The conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan II.'s wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV.'s wife, Juana, are destroyed by chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and, as some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk. His seventeen surviving songs are all erotic, with the exception of the Flama del divino Rayo, his best performance in thanksgiving for his spiritual conversion. His loves are also recounted in three prose books, of which the semi-chivalresque novel, El Siervo libre de Amor, is still readable. But Rodríguez interests most as the last representative of the Galician verse tradition.
Save Ayala, who is exampled by one solitary poem, the oldest singer in Baena's choir is Pero Ferrús, the connecting link between the Galician and Italian schools. A learned rather than an inspired poet, Ferrús is remembered chiefly because of his chance allusion to Amadís in the stanzas dedicated to Ayala. Four poets in Baena's song-book herald the invasion of Spain by the Italians, and it is fitting that the first and best of these should be a man of Italian blood, Francisco Imperial, the son of a Genoese jeweller, settled in Seville. Imperial, as his earliest poem shows, read Arabic and English. He may have met with Gower's Confessio Amantis before it was done into Castilian by Juan de la Cuenca at the beginning of the fifteenth century—being the first translation of an English book in Spain. Howbeit, he quotes English phrases, and offers a copy of French verses. These are trifles: Imperial's best gift to his adopted country was his transplanting of Dante, whom he imitates assiduously, reproducing the Florentine note with such happy intonation as to gain for him the style of poet—as distinguished from trovador—from Santillana, who awards him "the laurel of this western land." Thirteen poems by Ruy Paez de Ribera, vibrating with the melancholy of illness, shuddering with the squalor of want, affiliate their writer with Imperial's new expression, and vaguely suggest the realising touch of Villon. At least one piece by Ferrant Sánchez Talavera is memorable—the elegy on the death of the Admiral Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, which anticipates the mournful march, the solemn music, some of the very phrases of Jorge Manrique's noble coplas. In the Dantesque manner is Gonzalo Martínez de Medina's flagellation of the corruptions of his age. Baena, secretary to Juan II., in eighty numbers approves himself a weak imitator of Villasandino's insolence, and is remembered simply as the arranger of a handbook which testifies to the definitive triumph of the compiler's enemies.
A poet of greater performance than any in the Cancionero de Baena is the shifty politician, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458), townsman of Rabbi Sem Tob, the Jew of Carrión. Oddly enough, Baena excludes Santillana from his collection, and Santillana, in reviewing the poets of his time, ignores Baena, whom he probably despised as a parasite. A remarkable letter to the Constable of Portugal shows Santillana as a pleasant prose-writer; in his rhetorical Lamentaçion en Propheçia de la segunda Destruyçion de España he fails in the grand style, though he succeeds in the familiar with his collection of old wives' fireside proverbs, Refranes que diçen las Viejas tras el Huego. His Centiloquio, a hundred rhymed proverbs divided into fourteen chapters, is gracefully written and skilfully put together; his Comedieta de Ponza is reminiscent of both Dante and Boccaccio, and its title, together with the fact that the dialogue is allotted to different personages, has led many into the error of taking it for a dramatic piece. Far more essentially dramatic in spirit is the Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna, which embodies a doctrinal argument upon the advantages of the philosophic mind in circumstances of adversity; and grouped with this goes the Doctrinal de Privados, a fierce philippic against Álvaro de Luna, Santillana's political foe, who is convicted of iniquities out of his own mouth.
It is impossible to say of Santillana that he was an original genius: it is within bounds to class him as a highly gifted versifier with extraordinary imitative powers. He has no "message" to deliver, no wide range of ideas: his attraction lies not so much in what is said as in his trick of saying it. He is one of the few poets whom erudition has not hampered. He was familiar with writers as diverse as Dante and Petrarch and Alain Chartier, and he reproduces their characteristics with a fine exactness and felicity. But he was something more than an intelligent echo, for he filed and laboured till he acquired a final manner of his own. Doubtless to his own taste his forty-two sonnets—fechos al itálico modo, as he proudly tells you were his best titles to glory; and it is true that he acclimatised the sonnet in Spain, sharing with the Aragonese, Juan de Villapando, the honour of being Spain's only sonneteer before Boscán's time. Commonplace in thought, stiff in expression, the sonnets are only historically curious. It is in his lighter vein that Santillana reaches his full stature. The grace and gaiety of his decires, serranillas and vaqueiras are all his own. If he borrowed suggestions from Provençal poets, he is free of the Provençal artifice, and sings with the simplicity of Venus' doves. Here he revealed a peculiar aspect of his many-sided temperament, and by his tact made a living thing of primitive emotions, which were to be done to death in the pastorals of heavy-handed bunglers. The first-fruits of the pastoral harvest live in the house where Santillana garnered them, and those roses, amid which he found the milkmaid of La Finojosa, are still as sweet in his best known—and perhaps his best—ballad as on that spring morning, between Calateveño and Santa María, some four hundred years since. Ceasing to be an imitator, Santillana proves inimitable.
The official court-poet of the age was Juan de Mena (1411-56), known to his own generation as the "prince of Castilian poets," and Cervantes, writing more than a hundred and fifty years afterwards, dubs him "that great Córdoban poet." A true son of Córdoba, Mena has all the qualities of the Córdoban school—the ostentatious embellishment of his ancestor, Lucan, and the unintelligible preciosity of his descendant, Góngora. The Italian travels of his youth undid him, and set him on the hopeless line of Italianising Spanish prose. A false attribution enters the Annals of Juan II. under Mena's name: the mere fact that Juan II.'s Crónica is a model of correct prose disposes of the pretension. Mena's summary of the Iliad, and the commentary to his poem the Coronación, convict him of being the worst prose-writer in all Castilian literature. Simplicity and vulgarity were for him synonyms, and he carries his doctrine to its logical extreme by adopting impossible constructions, by wrenching his sentences asunder by exaggerated inversions, and by adding absurd Latinisms to his vocabulary. These defects are less grave in his verse, but even there they follow him. Argote de Molina would have him the author of the political satire called the Coplas de la Panadera; but Mena lacked the lightness of touch, the wit and sparkle of the imaginary baker's wife. If he be read at all, he is to be studied in his Laberinto, also known as the Trescientas, a heavy allegory whose deliberate obscurity is indicated by its name. The alternative title, Trescientas; is explained by the fact that the poem consisted of three hundred stanzas, to which sixty-five were added by request of the King, who kept the book by him of nights and hankered for a stanza daily, using it, maybe, as a soporific. The poet is whisked by the dragons in Bellona's chariot to Fortune's palace, and there begins the inevitable imitation of Dante, with its machinery of seven planetary circles, and its grandiose vision of past, present, and future. The work of a learned poet taking himself too seriously and straining after effects beyond his reach, the Laberinto is tedious as a whole; yet, though Mena's imagination fails to realise his abstractions, though he be riddled with purposeless conceits, he touches a high level in isolated episodes. Much of his vogue may be accounted for by the abundance with which he throws off striking lines of somewhat hard, even marmoreal beauty, and by the ardent patriotism which inspires him in his best passages. A poet by flashes, at intervals rare and far apart, Mena does himself injustice by too close a devotion to æsthetic principles, that made failure a certainty. Careful, conscientious, aspiring, he had done far more if he had attempted much less.
Meanwhile Castilian prose goes forward on Alfonso's lines. The anonymous Crónica of Juan II., wrongly ascribed to Mena and Pérez de Guzmán, but more probably due to Álvar García de Santa María and others unknown, is a classic example of style and accuracy, rare in official historiography. Mingled with many chivalresque details concerning the hidalgos of the court is the central episode of the book, the execution of the Constable, Álvaro de Luna. The last great scene is skilfully prepared and is recounted with artful simplicity in a celebrated passage:—"He set to undoing his doublet-collar, making ready his long garments of blue camlet, lined with fox-skins; and, the master being stretched upon the scaffold, the executioner came to him, begged his pardon, embraced him, ran the poniard through his neck, cut off his head, and hung it on a hook; and the head stayed there nine days, the body three." Passionate declamation of a still higher order is found in the Crónica de Don Álvaro de Luna, written by a most dexterous advocate, who puts his mastery of phrase, his graphic presentation and dramatic vigour, to the service of partisanship. Perhaps no man was ever quite so great and good as Álvaro de Luna appears in his Crónica, but the strength of conviction in the narrator is expressed in terms of moving eloquence that would persuade to accept the portrait, not merely as a masterpiece—for that it is—but, as an authentic presentment of a misunderstood hero.
After much violent controversy, it may now be taken as settled that the Crónica del Cid is based upon Alfonso's Estoria de Espanna. But it comes not direct, being borrowed from Alfonso XI.'s Crónica de Castilla, a transcript of the Estoria. The differences from the early text may be classed under three heads: corruptions of the early text, freer and exacter quotations from the romances, and deliberate alterations made with an eye to greater conformity with popular legends. Valuable as containing the earliest versions of many traditions which were to be diffused through the Romanceros, the Crónica del Cid is of small historic authority, and Alfonso's stately prose loses greatly in the carrying.
Ayala's nephew, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (1378-1460), continues his uncle's poetic tradition in the forms borrowed from Italy, as well as in earlier lyrics of the Galician school; but his mediocre performances as a poet are overshadowed by his brilliant exploit as a historian. He is responsible for the Mar de Historias (The Sea of Histories), which consists of three divisions. The first deals with emperors and kings ranging from Alexander to King Arthur, from Charlemagne to Godfrey de Bouillon; the second treats of saints and sages, their lives and the books they wrote; and both are arrangements of some French version of Guido delle Colonne's Mare Historiarum. The third part, now known as the Generaciones y Semblanzas (Generations and Likenesses), is Pérez de Guzmán's own workmanship. Foreign critics have compared him to Plutarch and to St. Simon; and, though the parallel seems dangerous, it can be maintained. This amounts to saying that Pérez de Guzmán is one of the greatest portrait-painters in the world; and that precisely he is. He argues from the seen to the unseen with a curious anticipation of modern psychological methods; and it forms an integral part of his plan to draw his personages with the audacity of truth. He does his share, and there they stand, living as our present-day acquaintances, and better known. Take a few figures at random from his gallery: Enrique de Villena, fat, short, and fair, a libidinous glutton, ever in the clouds, a dolt in practice, subtle of genius so that he came by all pure knowledge easily; Núñez de Guzmán, dissolute, of giant strength, curt of speech, a jovial roysterer; the King Enrique, grave-visaged, bitter-tongued, lonely, melancholy; Catherine of Lancaster, tall, fair, ruddy, wine-bibbing, ending in paralysis; the Constable López Dávalos, a self-made man, handsome, taking, gay, amiable, strong, a fighter, clever, prudent, but—as man must have some fault—cunning and given to astrology. With such portraits Pérez de Guzmán abounds. The picture costs him no effort: the man is seized in the act and delivered to you, with no waste of words, with no essential lacking, classified as a museum specimen, impartially but with a tendency to severity; and when Pérez de Guzmán has spoken, there is no more to say. He is a good hater, and lets you see it when he deals with courtiers, whom he regards with the true St. Simonian loathing for an upstart. But history has confirmed the substantial justice of his verdicts, and has thus shown that the artist in him was even stronger than the malignant partisan. It is saying much. And to his endowment of observation, intelligence, knowledge, and character, Pérez de Guzmán joins the perfect practice of that clear, energetic Castilian speech which his forebears bequeathed him.
An interesting personal narrative hides beneath the mask of the Vida y Hazañas del gran Tamarlán (Life and Deeds of the Mighty Timour). First published in 1582, this work is nothing less than a report of the journey (1403-6) of Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412), who traversed all the space "from silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon," and more. Clavijo tells of his wanderings with a quaint mingling of credulity and scepticism; still, his witness is at least as trustworthy as Marco Polo's, and his recital is vastly more graphic than the Venetian's. A very similar motive informs the Crónica del Conde de Buelna, Don Pero Niño (1375-1446), by Pero Niño's friend and pennon-bearer, Gutierre Díaz Gámez. An alternative title—the Victorial—discloses the author's intention of representing his leader as the hero of countless triumphs by sea and land. A well-read esquire, Díaz Gámez quotes from the Libro de Alexandre, flecks his pages with allusions, and—with a true traveller's lust for local colouring—comes pat with technical French terms: his sanglieres, mestrieres, cursieres, destrieres. These affectations apart, Díaz Gámez writes with sense and force; exalting his chief overmuch, but giving bright glimpses of a mad, adventurous life, and rising to altisonant eloquence in chivalresque outbursts, one of which Cervantes has borrowed, and not bettered, in Don Quixote's great discourse on letters and arms.
Knight-errantry was, indeed, beginning to possess the land, and, as it chances, an account of the maddest, hugest tourney in the world's history is written for us by an eye-witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena, in the Libro del Paso Honroso (Book of the Passage of Honour). Lena tells how the demon of chivalry entered into Suero de Quiñones, who, seeking release from his pledge of wearing in his lady's honour an iron chain each Thursday, could hit on no better means than by offering, with nine knightly brethren, to hold the bridge of San Marcos at Órbigo against the paladins of Europe. The tilt lasted from July 10 to August 9, 1434, and is described with simple directness by Lena, who looks upon the six hundred single combats as the most natural thing in the world: but his story is important as a "human document," and as testimony that the extravagant incidents of the chivalrous romances had their counterparts in real life.
The fifteenth century finds the chivalrous romance established in Spain: how it arrived there must be left for discussion till we come to deal with the best example of the kind—Amadís de Gaula. Here and now it suffices to say that there probably existed an early Spanish version of this story which has disappeared; and to note that the dividing line between the annals, filled with impossible traditions, and the chivalrous tales, is of the finest: so fine, in fact, that several of the latter—for example, Florisel de Niquea and Amadís de Grecia—take on historical airs and call themselves crónicas. The mention of the lost Castilian Amadís is imperative at this point if we are to recognise one of the chief contemporary influences. For the moment, we must be content to note its practical manifestations in the extravagances of Suero de Quiñones, and of other knights whose names are given in the chronicles of Álvaro de Luna and Juan II. The spasmodic outbursts of the craze observable in the serious chapters of Díaz Gámez are but the distant rumblings before the hurricane.
While Amadís de Gaula was read in courts and palaces, three contemporary writers worked in different veins. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (1398-?1466), Archpriest of Talavera, and chaplain to Juan II., is the author of the Reprobación del Amor mundano, otherwise El Corbacho (The Scourge). The latter title, not of the author's choosing, has led some to say that he borrowed from Boccaccio. The resemblance between the Reprobación and the Italian Corbaccio is purely superficial. Martínez goes forth to rebuke the vices of both sexes in his age; but the moral purpose is dropped, and he settles down to a deliberate invective against women and their ways. Amador de los Ríos suggests that Martínez stole hints from Francisco Eximenis' Carro de la donas, a Catalan version of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus: as the latter is a panegyric on the sex, the suggestion is unacceptable. The plain fact stares us in the face that Martínez' immediate model is the Archpriest of Hita, and in his fourth chapter that jovial clerk is cited. Indiscriminate, unjust, and even brutal, as Martínez often is, his slashing satire may be read with extraordinary pleasure: that is, when we can read him at all, for his editions are rare and his vocabulary puzzling. He falls short of Ruiz' wicked urbanity; but he matches him in keenness of malicious wit, in malignant parody, in picaresque intention, while he surpasses him as a collector of verbal quips and popular proverbs. The wealth of his splenetic genius (it is nothing less) affords at least one passage to the writer of the Celestina. Last of all—and this is an exceeding virtue—Martínez' speech maintains a fine standard of purity at a time when foreign corruptions ran riot. Hence he deserves high rank among the models of Castilian prose.
Another chaplain of Juan II., Juan de Lucena (fl. 1453), is the author of the Vita Beata, lacking in originality, but notable for excellence of absolute style. He follows Cicero's plan in the De finibus bonorum et malorum, introducing Santillana, Mena, and García de Santa María (the probable author, as we have seen, of the King's Crónica). In an imaginary conversation these great personages discuss the question of mortal happiness, arriving at the pessimist conclusion that it does not exist, or—sorry alternative—that it is unattainable. Lucena adds nothing to the fund of ideas upon this hackneyed theme, but the perfect finish of his manner lends attraction to his lucid commonplaces.
The last considerable writer of the time is the Bachelor Alfonso de la Torre (fl. 1461), who returns upon the didactic manner in his Visión deleitable de la Filosofía y Artes liberales. Nominally, the Bachelor offers a philosophic, allegorical novel; in substance, his work is a mediæval encyclopædia. It was assuredly never designed for entertainment, but it must still be read by all who are curious to catch those elaborate harmonies and more delicate refinements of fifteenth-century Castilian prose which half tempt to indulgence for the writer's insufferable priggishness. Alfonso de la Torre figures by right in the anthologies, and his elegant extracts win an admiration of which his unhappy choice of subject would otherwise deprive him.
Footnote:
[5] Strictly speaking, this writer should be called Enrique de Aragón; but, since this leads to confusion with his contemporary, the Infante Enrique de Aragón, it is convenient to distinguish him as Enrique de Villena. He was not a marquis, and never uses the title.