The literary movement of Juan II.'s reign is overlapped and continued outside Spain by poets in the train of Alfonso V. of Aragón, who, conquering Naples in 1443, became the patron of scholars like George of Trebizond and Æneas Sylvius. It is notable that, despite their new Italian environment, Alfonso's singers write by preference in Castilian rather than in their native Catalan. Their work is to be sought in the Cancionero General, in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa, and especially in the Cancionero de Stúñiga, which derives its name from the accident that the first two poems in the collection are by Lope de Stúñiga, cousin of that Suero de Quiñones who held the Paso Honroso, mentioned under Lena's name in the previous chapter. Stúñiga prolongs the courtly tradition in verses whose extreme finish is remarkable. Juan de Tapia, Juan de Andújar, and Fernando de la Torre practise in the same school of knightly hedonism; and at the opposite pole is Juan de Valladolid, son of the public executioner, a vagabond minstrel, who passed his life in coarse polemics with Antón de Montero, with Gómez Manrique, and with Manrique's brother, the Conde de Paredes. A notorious name is that of Pero Torrellas, whose Coplas de las calidades de las donas won their author repute as a satirist of women, and begot innumerable replies and counterpleas: the satire, to tell the truth, is poor enough, and is little more than violent but pointless invective. The best as well as the most copious poet of the Neapolitan group is Carvajal (or Carvajales), who bequeaths us the earliest known romance, and so far succumbs to circumstances as to produce occasional verses in Italian. In Castilian, Carvajal has the true lyrical cry, and is further distinguished by a virile, martial note, in admirable contrast with the insipid courtesies of his brethren.
To return to Spain, where, in accordance with the maxim that one considerable poet begets many poetasters, countless rhymesters spring from Mena's loins. The briefest mention must suffice for the too-celebrated Coplas del Provincial, which, to judge by the extracts printed from its hundred and forty-nine stanzas, is a prurient lampoon against private persons. It lacks neither vigour nor wit, and denotes a mastery of mordant phrase: but the general effect of its obscene malignity is to make one sympathise with the repeated attempts at its suppression. The attribution to Rodrigo Cota of this perverse performance is capricious: internal evidence goes to show that the libel is the work of several hands.
A companion piece of far greater merit is found in thirty-two octosyllabic stanzas entitled Coplas de Mingo Revulgo. Like the Coplas del Provincial, this satirical eclogue has been referred to Rodrigo Cota, and, like many other anonymous works, it has been ascribed to Mena. Neither conjecture is supported by evidence, and Sarmiento's ascription of Mingo Revulgo to Hernando del Pulgar, who wrote an elaborate commentary on it, rests on the puerile assumption that "none but the poet could have commented himself with such clearness." Two shepherds—Mingo Revulgo and Gil Aribato—represent the lower and upper class respectively, discussing the abuses of society. Gil Aribato blames the people, whose vices are responsible for corruption in high places; Mingo Revulgo contends that the dissolute King should bear the blame for the ruin of the state, and the argument ends by lauding the golden mean of the burgess. The tone of Mingo Revulgo is more moderate than that of the Provincial; the attacks on current evils are more general, more discreet, and therefore more deadly; and the aim of the later satire is infinitely more serious and elevated. Cast in dramatic form, but devoid of dramatic action, Mingo Revulgo leads directly to the eclogues of Juan del Encina, so often called the father of the Spanish theatre; but its immediate interest lies in the fact that it is the first of effective popular satires.
Among the poets of this age, the Jewish convert, Antón de Montoro, el Ropero (1404-?1480), holds a place apart. A fellow of parts, Montoro combined verse-making with tailoring, and his trade is frequently thrown in his teeth by rivals smarting under his bitter insolence. Save when he pleads manfully for his kinsfolk, who are persecuted and slaughtered by a bloodthirsty mob, Montoro's serious efforts are mostly failures. His picaresque verses, especially those addressed to Juan de Valladolid, are replenished with a truculent gaiety which amuses us almost as much as it amused Santillana; but he should be read in extracts rather than at length. He is suspected of complicity in the Coplas del Provincial, and there is good ground for thinking that to him belong the two most scandalous pieces in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa—namely, the Pleito del Manto (Suit of the Coverlet), and a certain unmentionable comedy which purports to be by Fray Montesino, and travesties Mena's Trescientas in terms of extreme filthiness. Montoro's short pieces are reminiscent of Juan Ruiz, and, for all his indecency, it is fair to credit him with much cleverness and with uncommon technical skill. His native vulgarity betrays him into excesses of ribaldry which mar the proper exercise of his undeniable gifts.
A better man and a better writer is Juan Álvarez Gato (?1433-96), the Madrid knight of whom Gómez Manrique says that he "spoke pearls and silver." It is difficult for us to judge him on his merits, for, though his cancionero exists, it has not yet been printed; and we are forced to study him as he is represented in the Cancionero General, where his love-songs show a dignity of sentiment and an exquisiteness of expression not frequent in any epoch, and exceptional in his own time. His sacred lyrics, the work of his old age, lack unction: but even here his mastery of form saves his pious villancicos from oblivion, and ranks him as the best of Encina's predecessors. His friend, Hernán Mexía, follows Pero Torrellas with a satire on the foibles of women, in which he easily outdoes his model in mischievous wit and in ingenious fancy.
Gómez Manrique, Señor de Villazopeque (1412-91), is a poet of real distinction, whose entire works have been reprinted from two complementary cancioneros discovered in 1885. Sprung from a family illustrious in Spanish history, Gómez Manrique was a foremost leader in the rebellion of the Castilian nobles against Enrique IV. In allegorical pieces like the Batalla de amores, he frankly imitates the Galician model, and in one instance he replies to a certain Don Álvaro in Portuguese. Then he joins himself to the rising Italian school, wherein his uncle, Santillana, had preceded him; and his experiments extend to adaptations of Sem Tob's sententious moralisings, to didactic poems in the manner of Mena, and to coplas on Juan de Valladolid, in which he measures himself unsuccessfully with the rude tailor, Montoro. Humour was not Gómez Manrique's calling, and his attention to form is an obvious preoccupation which diminishes his vigour: but his chivalrous refinement and noble tenderness are manifest in his answer to Torrellas' invective. His pathos is nowhere more touching than in the elegiacs on Garcilaso de la Vega; while in the lines to his wife, Juana de Mendoza, Gómez Manrique portrays the fleetingness of life, the sting of death, with almost incomparable beauty.
His Representación del Nacimiento de Nuestro Señor, the earliest successor to the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, is a liturgical drama written for and played at the convent of Calabazanos, of which his sister was Superior. It consists of twenty octosyllabic stanzas delivered by the Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Gabriel, St. Michael, St. Raphael, an angel, and three shepherds, the whole closing with a cradle-song. Simple as the construction is, it is more elaborate than that of a later play on the Passion, wherein the Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalen appear (though the last takes no part in the dialogue). The refrain or estribillo at the end of each stanza goes to show that this piece was intended to be sung. These primitive essays in the hieratic drama have all the interest of what was virtually a new invention, and their historical importance is only exceeded by that of a secular play, written by Gómez Manrique for the birthday of Alfonso, brother of Enrique IV., in which the Infanta Isabel played one of the Muses. In all three experiments the action is of the slightest, though the dialogue is as dramatic as can be expected from a first attempt. The point to be noted is that Gómez Manrique foreshadows both the lay and sacred elements of the Spanish theatre.
His fame has been unjustly eclipsed by that of his nephew, Jorge Manrique, Señor de Belmontejo (1440-1478), a brilliant soldier and partisan of Queen Isabel's, who perished in an encounter before the gates of Garci-Múñoz, and is renowned by reason of a single masterpiece. His verses are mostly to be found in the Cancionero General, and a few are given in the cancioneros of Seville and Toledo. Like that of his uncle, Gómez, his vein of humour is thin and poor, and the satiric stanzas to his stepmother border on vulgarity. In acrostic love-songs and in other compositions of a like character, Jorge Manrique is merely clever in the artificial style of many contemporaries—is merely a careful craftsman absorbed in the technical details of art, with small merit beyond that of formal dexterity. The forty-three stanzas entitled the Coplas de Jorge Manrique por la muerte de su padre, have brought their writer an immortality which, outliving all freaks of taste, seems as secure as Cervantes' own. An attempt has been made to prove that Jorge Manrique's elegiacs on his father are not original, and that the elegist had some knowledge of Abu 'l-Bakā Salih ar-Rundi's poem on the decadence of the Moslem power in Spain. Undoubtedly Valera has so ingeniously rendered the Arab poet as to make the resemblance seem pronounced: but the theory is untenable, for it is not pretended that Jorge Manrique could read Arabic, and lofty commonplaces on death abound in all literature, from the Bible downwards.
In this unique composition Jorge Manrique approves himself, for once, a poet of absolute genius, an exquisite in lyrical orchestration. The poem opens with a slow movement, a solemn lament on the vanity of grandeur, the frailty of life; it modulates into resigned acceptance of an inscrutable decree; it closes with a superb symphony, through which are heard the voices of the seraphim and the angelic harps of Paradise. The workmanship is of almost incomparable excellence, and in scarcely one stanza can the severest criticism find a technical flaw. Jorge Manrique's sincerity touched a chord which vibrates in the universal heart, and his poem attained a popularity as immediate as it was imperishable. Camões sought to imitate it; writers like Montemôr and Silvestre glossed it; Lope de Vega declared that it should be written in letters of gold; it was done into Latin and set to music in the sixteenth century by Venegas de Henestrosa; and in our century it has been admirably translated by Longfellow in a version from which these stanzas are taken:—
By the side of this achievement the remaining poems of Enrique IV.'s reign seem wan and withered. But mention is due to the Sevillan, Pedro Guillén de Segovia (1413-74), who, beginning life under the patronage of Álvaro de Luna, Santillana, and Mena, passes into the household of the alchemist-archbishop Carrillo, and proclaims himself a disciple of Gómez Manrique. His chief performance is his metrical version of the Seven Penitential Psalms, which is remarkable as being the first attempt at introducing the biblical element into Spanish literature.
Prose is represented by the Segovian, Diego Enríquez del Castillo (fl. 1470), chaplain and privy councillor to Enrique IV., whose official Crónica he drew up in a spirit of candid impartiality; but there is ground for suspecting that he revised his manuscript after the King's death. Charged with speeches and addresses, his history is written with pompous correctness, and it seems probable that the wily trimmer so chose his sonorous ambiguities of phrase as to avoid offending either his sovereign or the rebel magnates whose triumph he foresaw. Another chronicle of this reign is ascribed to Alfonso Fernández de Palencia (1423-92), who is also rashly credited with the authorship of the Coplas del Provincial; but it is not proved that Palencia wrote any other historical work than his Latin Gesta Hispaniensia, a mordant presentation of the time's corruptions. The Castilian chronicle which passes under his name is a rough translation of the Gesta, made without the writer's authority. Its involved periods, some of them a chapter long, are very remote from the admirably vigorous style of Palencia's allegorical Batalla campal entre los lobos y los perros (Pitched Battle between Wolves and Dogs), and his patriotic Perfección del triunfo militar, wherein he vaunts, not without reason, his countrymen as among the best fighting men in Europe. Palencia's gravest defect is his tendency to Latinise his construction, as in his poor renderings of Plutarch and Josephus. But at his best he writes with ease and force and distinction. The Crónica de hechos del Condestable Miguel Lucas Iranzo, possibly the work of Juan de Olid, is in no sense the history it professes to be, and is valuable mainly because of its picturesque, yet simple and natural digressions on the social life of Spain.
The very year of the Catholic King's accession (1474) coincides with the introduction of the art of printing into Spain. Ticknor dates this event as happening in 1468, remarking that "there can be no doubt about the matter." Unluckily, the book upon which he relies is erroneously dated. Les Trobes en lahors de la Verge María—the first volume printed in Spain—is a collection of devout verses in Valencian, by forty-four poets, mostly Catalans. Of these, Francisco de Castellví, Francisco Barcelo, Pedro de Civillar, and an anonymous singer—Hum Castellá sens nom—write in Castilian. From 1474 onward, printing-presses multiply, and versions of masters like Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, made by Pedro Fernández de Villegas, by Álvar Gómez, and by Antonio de Obregón, are printed in quick succession. Henceforward the best models are available beyond a small wealthy circle; but the results of this popularisation are not immediate.
Íñigo de Mendoza, a gallant and a Franciscan, appears as a disciple of Mena and Gómez Manrique in his Vita Christi, which halts at the Massacre of the Innocents. Fray Íñigo is too prone to digressions, and to misplaced satire mimicked from Mingo Revulgo, yet his verses have a pleasing, unconventional charm in their adaptation to devout purpose of such lyric forms as the romance and the villancico. His fellow-monk, Ambrosio Montesino, Isabel's favourite poet, conveys to Spain the Italian realism of Jacopone da Todi in his Visitación de Nuestra Señora, and in hymns fitted to the popular airs preserved in Asenjo Barbieri's Cancionero Musical de los siglos xv. y xvi. This embarrassing condition, joined to the writer's passion for conciseness, results in hard effects; yet, at his best, he pipes "a simple song for thinking hearts," and, as Menéndez y Pelayo, the chief of Spanish critics, observes, Montesino's historic interest lies in his suffusing popular verse with the spirit of mysticism, and in his transmuting the popular forms of song into artistic forms.
Space fails for contemporary authors of esparsas, decires, resquestas, more or less ingenious; but we cannot omit the name of the Carthusian, Juan de Padilla (1468-?1522), who suffers from an admirer's indiscretion in calling him "the Spanish Homer." His Retablo de la Vida de Cristo versifies the Saviour's life in the manner of Juvencus, and his more elaborate poem, Los doce triunfos de los doce Apóstoles, strives to fuse Dante's severity with Petrarch's grace. Rhetorical out of season, and tending to abuse his sonorous vocabulary, Padilla indulges in verbal eccentricities and in sudden drops from altisonance to familiarity; but in his best passages—his journey through hell and purgatory, guided by St. Paul—he excels by force of vision, by his realisation of the horror of the grave, and by his vigorous transcription of the agonies of the lost. The allegorical form is again found in the Infierno del Amor of Garci Sánchez de Badajoz, who ended life in a madhouse. His presentation of Macías, Rodríguez del Padrón, Santillana, and Jorge Manrique in thrall to love's enchantments, was to the taste of his time, and a poem with the same title, Infierno del Amor, made the reputation of a certain Guevara, whose scattered songs are full of picaresque and biting wit. For the rest, Sánchez de Badajoz depends upon his daring, almost blasphemous humour, his facility in improvising, and his mastery of popular forms.
Of the younger poetic generation, Pedro Manuel de Urrea (1486-? 1530) is the most striking artist. His Peregrinación á Jersualén and his Penitencia de Amor are practically inaccessible, but his Cancionero displays an ingenious and versatile talent. Urrea's aristocratic spirit revolts at the thought that in this age of printing his songs will be read "in cellars and kitchens," and the publication of his verses seems due to his mother. His Fiestas de Amor, translated from Petrarch, are tedious, but he has a perfect mastery of the popular décima, and his villancicos abound in quips of fancy matched by subtleties of expression. Urrea fails when he closes a stanza with a Latin tag—a dubious adonic, such as Dominus tecum. He fares better with his modification of Jorge Manrique's stanza, approving his skill in modulatory effects. His most curious essay is his verse rendering of the Celestina's first act; for here he anticipates the very modes of Lope de Vega and of Tirso de Molina. But in his own day he was not the sole practitioner in dramatic verse.
A distinct progress in this direction is made by Rodrigo Cota de Maguaque (fl. 1490), a convert Jew, who incited the mob to massacre his brethren. Wrongly reputed the author of the Coplas del Provincial, of Mingo Revulgo, and of the Celestina, Cota is the parent of fifty-eight quatrains, in the form of a burlesque wedding-song, recently discovered by M. Foulché-Delbosc. But Cota's place in literature is ensured by his celebrated Diálogo entre el Amor y un Viejo. In seventy stanzas Love and the Ancient argue the merits of love, till the latter yields to the persuasion of the god, who then derides the hoary amorist. The dialogue is eminently dramatic both in form and spirit, the action convincing, clear, and rapid, while the versification is marked by an exquisite melody. It is not known that the Diálogo was ever played, yet it is singularly fitted for scenic presentation.
The earliest known writer for the stage among the moderns was, as we have already said, Gómez Manrique; but earlier spectacles are frequently mentioned in fifteenth-century chronicles. These may be divided into entremeses, a term loosely applied to balls and tourneys, accompanied by chorus-singing; and into momos, entertainments which took on a more literary character, and which found excuses for dramatic celebrations at Christmas and Eastertide. Gómez Manrique had made a step forward, but his pieces are primitive and fragmentary compared to those of Juan del Encina (1468-1534). A story given in the scandalous Pleito del Manto reports that Encina was the son of Pero Torrellas, and another idle tale declares him to be Juan de Tamayo. The latter is proved a blunder; the former is discredited by Encina's solemn cursing of Torrellas. Encina passed from the University of Salamanca to the household of the Duke of Alba (1493), was present next year at the siege of Granada, and celebrated the victory in his Triunfo de fama. Leaving for Italy in 1498, he is found at Rome in 1502, a favourite with that Spanish Pope, Alexander VI. He returned to Spain, took orders, and sang his first mass at Jerusalem in 1519, at which date he was appointed Prior of the Monastery of León. He is thought to have died at Salamanca.
Encina began writing in his teens, and has left us over a hundred and seventy lyrics, composed before he was twenty-five years old. Nearly eighty pieces, with musical settings by the author, are given in Asenjo Barbieri's Cancionero Musical. His songs, when undisfigured by deliberate conceits, are full of devotional charm. Still, Encina abides with us in virtue of his eclogues, the first two being given in the presence of his patrons at Alba de Tormes, probably in 1492. His plays are fourteen in number, and were undoubtedly staged. Ticknor would persuade us that the seventh and eighth, though really one piece, "with a pause between," were separated by the poet "in his simplicity." Even Encina's simplicity may be overstated, and Ticknor's "pause" must have been long: for the seventh eclogue was played in 1494, and the eighth in 1495. His eclogues are eclogues only in name, being dramatic presentations of primitive themes, with a distinct but simple action. The occasion is generally a feast-day, and the subject is sometimes sacred. Yet not always so: the Égloga de Fileno dramatises the shepherd's passion for Lefira, and ends with a suicide suggested by the Celestina. In like wise, Encina's Plácida y Vitoriano, involving two attempted suicides and one scabrous scene, introduces Venus and Mercury as characters. Again, the Aucto del Repelón dramatises the adventures in the market-place of two shepherds, Johan Paramas and Piernicurto; while Cristino y Febea exhibits the ignominious downfall of a would-be hermit in phrases redolent of Cota's Diálogo. Simple as the motives are, they are skilfully treated, and the versification, especially in Plácida y Vitoriano, is pure and elegant. Encina elaborates the strictly liturgical drama to its utmost point, and his younger contemporary, Lucas Fernández, makes no further progress, for the obvious reason that no novelty was possible without incurring a charge of heresy. As Sr. Cotarelo y Mori has pointed out, the sacred drama remains undeveloped till the lives of saints and the theological mysteries are exploited by men of genius. Meanwhile, Encina has begun the movement which culminates in the autos of Calderón.
In another direction, the Spanish version of Amadís de Gaula (1508) marks an epoch. This story was known to Ayala and three other singers in Baena's chorus; and the probability is that the lost original was written in Portuguese by Joham de Lobeira (1261-1325), who uses in the Colocci-Brancuti Canzoniere (No. 230) the same ritournelle that Oriana sings in Amadís. García Ordóñez de Montalvo (fl. 1500) admits that three-fourths of his book is mere translation; and it may be that he was not the earliest Spaniard to annex the story, which, in the first instance, derives from France. Amadís of Gaul is a British knight, and, though the geography is bewildering, "Gaul" stands for Wales, as "Bristoya" and "Vindilisora" stand for Bristol and Windsor. The chronology is no less puzzling, for the action occurs "not many years after the Passion of our Redeemer." Briefly, the book deals with the chequered love of Amadís for Oriana, daughter of Lisuarte, King of Britain. Spells incredible, combats with giants, miraculous interpositions, form the tissue of episode, till fidelity is rewarded, and Amadís made happy.
Cervantes' Barber, classing the book as "the best in that kind," saved it from the holocaust, and posterity has accepted the Barber's sentence. Amadís is at least the only chivalresque novel that man need read. The style is excellent, and, though the tale is too long-drawn, the adventures are interesting, the supernatural machinery is plausibly arranged, and the plot is skilfully directed. Later stories are mostly burlesques of Amadís: the giants grow taller, the monsters fiercer, the lakes deeper, the torments sharper. In his Sergas de Esplandián, Montalvo fails when he attempts to take up the story at the end of Amadís. One tedious sequel followed another till, within half a century, we have a thirteenth Amadís. The best of its successors is Luis Hurtado's (or, perhaps, Francisco de Moraes') Palmerín 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." Nor is this mere irony. Burke avowed in the House of Commons that he had spent much time over Palmerín, and Johnson wasted a summer upon Felixmarte de Hircania. Wearisome as the kind was, its popularity was so unbounded that Hieronym Sempere, in the Caballería cristiana, applied the chivalresque formula to religious allegory, introducing Christ as the Knight of the Lion, Satan as the Knight of the Serpent, and the Apostles as the Twelve Knights of the Round Table. Of its class, Amadís de Gaula is the first and best.
From an earlier version of Amadís derives the Cárcel de Amor of Diego San Pedro, the writer of some erotic verses in the Cancionero de burlas. San Pedro tells the story of the loves of Leriano and Laureola, mingled with much allegory and chivalresque sentiment. The construction is weak, but the style is varied, delicate, and distinguished. Ending with a panegyric on women, "who, no less than cardinals, bequeath us the theological virtues," the book was banned by the Inquisition. But nothing stayed its course, and, despite all prohibitions, it was reprinted times out of number. The Cárcel de Amor ends with a striking scene of suicide, which was borrowed by many later novelists.
The first instance of its annexation occurs in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as the Celestina. This remarkable book, first published (as it seems) at Burgos, in 1499, has been classed as a play, or as a novel in dialogue. Its length would make it impossible on the boards, and its influence is most marked on the novel. As first published, it had sixteen acts, extended later to twenty-one, and in some editions to twenty-two. On the authority of Rojas, anxious as to the Inquisition, the first and longest act has been attributed to Mena and to Cota; but the prose is vastly superior to Mena's, while the verse is no less inferior to the lyrism of Cota's Diálogo. There is small doubt but that the whole is the work of the lawyer Fernando de Rojas, a native of Montalbán, who became Alcaide of Salamanca, and died, at a date unknown, at Talavera de la Reina.
The tale is briefly told. Calisto, rebuffed by Melibea, employs the procuress Celestina, who arranges a meeting between the lovers. But destiny works a speedy expiation: Celestina is murdered by Calisto's servants, Calisto is accidentally killed, and Melibea destroys herself before her father, whom she addresses in a set speech suggested by the Cárcel de Amor. Celestina is developed from Ruiz' Trota-conventos; Rojas' lovers, Calisto and Melibea, from Ruiz' Melón and Endrina; and some hints are drawn from Alfonso Martínez de Toledo. But, despite these borrowings, we have to deal with a completely original masterpiece, unique in its kind. We are no longer in an atmosphere thick with impossible monsters in incredible circumstances: we are in the very grip of life, in commerce with elemental, strait passions.
Rojas is the first Spanish novelist who brings a conscience to his work, who aims at more than whiling away an idle hour. He is not great in incident, his plot is clumsily fashioned, the pedantry of his age fetters him; but in effects of artistry, in energy of phrasing, he is unmatched by his coevals. Though he invented the comic type which was to become the gracioso of Calderón, his humour is thin; on the other hand, his realism and his pessimistic fulness are above praise. Choosing for his subject the tragedy of illicit passion, he hit on the means of exhibiting all his powers. His purpose is to give a transcript of life, objective and impersonal, and he fulfils it, adding thereunto a mysterious touch of sombre imagination. His characters are not Byzantine emperors and queens of Cornwall: he traffics in the passions of plain men and women, the agues of the love-sick, the crafts of senile vice, the venality and vauntings of picaroons, the effrontery of croshabells. Hence, from the first hour, his book took the world by storm, was imprinted in countless editions, was continued by Juan Sedeño and Feliciano da Silva—the same whose "reason of the unreasonableness" so charmed Don Quixote—was imitated by Sancho Muñón in Lisandro y Roselia, was used by Lope de Vega in the Dorotea, and was passed from the Spanish stage to be glorified as Romeo and Juliet.
Between the years 1508-12 was composed the anonymous Cuestión de Amor, a semi-historical, semi-social novel wherein contemporaries figure under feigned names, some of which are deciphered by the industry of Signor Croce, who reveals Belisena, for example, as Bona Sforza, afterwards Queen of Poland. Though much of its first success was due to the curiosity which commonly attaches to any roman à clef, it still interests because of its picturesque presentation of Spanish society in Italian surroundings, and the excellence of its Castilian style was approved by that sternest among critics, Juan de Valdés.
History is represented by the Historia de los Reyes católicos of Andrés Bernáldez (d. 1513), parish priest of Los Palacios, near Seville, who relates with spirit and simplicity the triumphs of the reign, waxing enthusiastic over the exploits of his friend Columbus. A more ambitious historian is Hernando del Pulgar (1436-?1492), whose Claros Varones de Castilla is a brilliant gallery of portraits, drawn by an observer who took Pérez de Guzmán for his master. Pulgar's Crónica de los Reyes católicos is mere official historiography, the work of a flattering partisan, the slave of flagrant prejudice; yet even here the charm of manner is seductive, though the perdurable value of the annals is naught. As a portrait-painter, as an intelligent analyst of character, as a wielder of Castilian prose, Pulgar ranks only second to his immediate model. He is to be distinguished from another Hernando del Pulgar (1451-1531), who celebrated the exploits of the great captain, Gonzalo de Córdoba, at the request of Carlos V. In this case, as in so many others, the old is better.
One great name, that of Christopher Columbus or Cristóbal Colón (1440-1506) is inseparable from those of the Catholic kings, who astounded their enemies by their ingratitude to the man who gave them a New World. Mystic and adventurer, Columbus wrote letters which are marked by sound practical sense, albeit couched in the apocalyptic phrases of one who holds himself for a seer and prophet. Incorrect, uncouth, and rugged as is his syntax, he rises on occasion to heights of eloquence astonishing in a foreigner. But it is perhaps imprudent to classify such a man as Columbus by his place of birth. An exception in most things, he was probably the truest Spaniard in all the Spains; and by virtue of his transcendent genius, visible in word as in action, he is filed upon the bede-roll of the Spanish glories.