CHAPTER III.
Imitations of the Italian Manner. — Acuña. — Cetina. — Opposition to it. — Castillejo. — Antonio de Villegas. — Silvestre. — Discussions concerning it. — Argote de Molina. — Montalvo. — Lope de Vega. — Its Final Success.
The example set by Boscan and Garcilasso was so well suited to the spirit and demands of the age, that it became as much a fashion, at the court of Charles the Fifth, to write in the Italian manner as it did to travel in Italy or make a military campaign there. Among those who earliest adopted the forms of Italian verse was Fernando de Acuña, a gentleman belonging to a noble Portuguese family, but born in Madrid and writing only in Spanish. He served in Flanders, in Italy, and in Africa; and after the conquest of Tunis, in 1535, a mutiny having occurred in its garrison, he was sent there by the Emperor, with unlimited authority to punish or to pardon those implicated in it; a difficult mission, whose duties he fulfilled with great discretion and with an honorable generosity.
In other respects, too, Acuña was treated with peculiar confidence. Charles the Fifth—as we learn from the familiar correspondence of Van Male, a poor scholar and gentleman who slept often in his bed-chamber and nursed him in his infirmities—amused the fretfulness of a premature old age, under which his proud spirit constantly chafed, by making a translation into Spanish prose of a French poem then much in vogue and favor,—the “Chevalier Délibéré.” Its author, Olivier de la Marche, was long attached to the service of Mary of Burgundy, the Emperor’s grandmother, and had made, in the Chevalier Délibéré, an allegorical show of the events in the life of her father, so flattering as to render his picture an object of general admiration at the time when Charles was educated at her brilliant court.[791] But the great Emperor, though his prose version of the pleasant reading of his youth is said to have been prepared with more skill and success than might have been anticipated from his imperfect training for such a task, felt that he was unable to give it the easy dress he desired it should wear in Castilian verse. This labor, therefore, in the plenitude of his authority, he assigned to Acuña; confiding to him the manuscript he had prepared in great secrecy, and requiring him to cast it into a more appropriate and agreeable form.
Acuña was well fitted for the delicate duty assigned to him. As a courtier, skilled in the humors of the palace, he omitted several passages that would be little interesting to his master, and inserted others that would be more so,—particularly several relating to Ferdinand and Isabella, and to Philip, Charles’s father. As a poet, he turned the Emperor’s prose into the old double quintillas with a purity and richness of idiom rare in any period of Spanish literature, and some portion of the merit of which has, perhaps justly, been attributed by Van Male to the Imperial version out of which it was constructed. The poem thus prepared—making three hundred and seventy-nine stanzas of ten short lines each—was then secretly given by Charles, as if it were a present worthy of a munificent sovereign, to Van Male, the poor servant, who records the facts relating to it, and then, forbidding all notice of himself in the Preface, the Emperor ordered an edition of it, so large, that the unhappy scholar trembled at the pecuniary risks he was to run on account of the bounty he had received. The “Cavallero Determinado,” as it was called in the version of Acuña, was, however, more successful than Van Male supposed it would be; and, partly from the interest the master of so many kingdoms must have felt in a work in which his secret share was considerable; partly from the ingenuity of the allegory, which is due in general to La Marche; and partly from the fluency and grace of the versification, which must be wholly Acuña’s, it became very popular; seven editions of it being called for in the course of half a century.[792]
But notwithstanding the success of the Cavallero Determinado, Acuña wrote hardly any thing else in the old national style and manner. His shorter poems, filling a small volume, are, with one or two inconsiderable exceptions, in the Italian measures, and sometimes are direct imitations of Boscan and Garcilasso. They are almost all written in good taste, and with a classical finish, especially “The Contest of Ajax with Ulysses,” where, in tolerable blank verse, Acuña has imitated the severe simplicity of Homer. He was known, too, in Italy, and his translation of a part of Boiardo’s “Orlando Innamorato” was praised there; but his miscellanies and his sonnets found more favor at home. He died at Granada, it is said, in 1580, while prosecuting a claim he had inherited to a Spanish title; but his poems were not printed till 1591, when, like those of Boscan, with which they may be fairly ranked, they were published by the pious care of his widow.[793]
Less fortunate in this respect than Acuña was Gutierre de Cetina, another Spaniard of the same period and school, since no attempt has ever been made to collect his poems. The few that remain to us, however,—his madrigals, sonnets, and other short pieces,—have much merit. Sometimes they take an Anacreontic tone; but the better specimens are rather marked by sweetness, like the following madrigal:—
Eyes, that have still serenely shone,
And still for gentleness been praised,
Why thus in anger are ye raised,
When turned on me, and me alone?
The more ye tenderly and gently beam,
The more to all ye winning seem;—
But yet,—O, yet,—dear eyes, serene and sweet,
Turn on me still, whate’er the glance I meet![794]
Like many others of his countrymen, Cetina was a soldier, and fought bravely in Italy. Afterwards he visited Mexico, where he had a brother in an important public office; but he died, at last, in Seville, his native city, about the year 1560. He was an imitator of Garcilasso, even more than of the Italians who were Garcilasso’s models.[795]
But an Italian school was not introduced into Spanish literature without a contest. We cannot, perhaps, tell who first broke ground against it, as an unprofitable and unjustifiable innovation; but Christóval de Castillejo, a gentleman of Ciudad Rodrigo, was the most efficient of its early opponents. He was attached, from the age of fifteen, to the person of Ferdinand, the younger brother of Charles the Fifth, and subsequently Emperor of Germany; passing a part of his life in Austria, as secretary to that prince, and ending it, in extreme old age, as a Carthusian monk, at the convent of Val de Iglesias, near Toledo. But wherever he lived, Castillejo wrote verses, and showed no favor to the new school. He attacked it in many ways, but chiefly by imitating the old masters in their villancicos, canciones, glosas, and the other forms and measures they adopted, though with a purer and better taste than they had generally shown.
Some of his poetry was written as early as 1540 and 1541; and, except the religious portion, which fills the latter part of the third and last of the three books into which his works are divided, it has generally a fresh and youthful air. Facility and gayety are, perhaps, its most prominent, though certainly not its highest, characteristics. Some of his love-verses are remarkable for their tenderness and grace, especially those addressed to Anna; but he shows the force and bent of his talent rather when he deals with practical life, as he does in his bitter discussion concerning the court; in a dialogue between his pen and himself; in a poem on Woman; and in a letter to a friend, asking counsel about a love affair;—all of which are full of living sketches of the national manners and feelings. Next to these, perhaps, some of his more fanciful pieces, such as his “Transformation of a Drunkard into a Mosquito,” are the most characteristic of his light-hearted nature.
But on every occasion where he finds an opening, or can make one, he attacks the imitators of the Italians, whom he contemptuously calls “Petrarquistas.” Once, he devotes to them a regular satire, which he addresses “to those who give up the Castilian measures and follow the Italian,” calling out Boscan and Garcilasso by name, and summoning Juan de Mena, Sanchez de Badajoz, Naharro, and others of the elder poets, to make merry with him, at the expense of the innovators. Almost everywhere he shows a genial temperament, and sometimes indulges himself in a freer tone than was thought beseeming at the time when he lived; in consequence of which, his poetry, though much circulated in manuscript, was forbidden by the Inquisition; so that all we now possess of it is a selection, which, by a sort of special favor, was exempted from censure, and permitted to be printed in 1573.[796]
Another of those who maintained the doctrines and wrote in the measures of the old school was Antonio de Villegas, whose poems, though written before 1551, were not printed till 1565. The Prólogo, addressed to the book, with instructions how it should bear itself in the world, reminds us sometimes of “The Soul’s Errand,” but is more easy and less poetical. The best poems of the volume are, indeed, of this sort, light and gay; rather running into pretty quaintnesses than giving token of deep feeling. The longer among them, like those on Pyramus and Thisbe, and on the quarrel between Ulysses and Ajax, are the least interesting. But the shorter pieces are many of them very agreeable. One to the Duke of Sesa, the descendant of Gonzalvo of Córdova, and addressed to him as he was going to Italy, where Cervantes served under his leading, is fortunate, from its allusion to his great ancestor. It begins thus:—
Go forth to Italy, great chief;
It is thy fated land,
Sown thick with deeds of brave emprise
By that ancestral hand
Which cast its seeds so widely there,
That, as thou marchest on,
The very soil will start afresh,
Teeming with glories won;
While round thy form, like myriad suns,
Shall shine a halo’s flame,
Enkindled from the dazzling light
Of thy great father’s fame.
More characteristic than this, however, because less heroic and grave, are eighteen décimas, or ten-line poems, called “Comparaciones,” because each ends with a comparison; the whole being preceded by a longer composition in the same style, addressing them all to his lady-love. The following may serve as a specimen of their peculiar tone and measure:—
Lady! so used my soul is grown
To serve thee always in pure truth,
That, drawn to thee, and thee alone,
My joys come thronging; and my youth
No grief can jar, save when thou grievest its tone.
But though my faithful soul be thus in part
Untuned, when dissonance it feels in thee,
Still, still to thine turns back my trembling heart,
As jars the well-tuned string in sympathy
With that which trembles at the tuner’s art.[797]
Gregorio Silvestre, a Portuguese, who came in his childhood to Spain, and died there in 1570, was another of those who wrote according to the earlier modes of composition. He was a friend of Torres de Naharro, of Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, and of Heredia; and, for some time, imitated Castillejo in speaking lightly of Boscan and Garcilasso. But, as the Italian manner prevailed more and more, he yielded somewhat to the fashion; and, in his latter years, wrote sonnets, and ottava and terza rima, adding to their forms a careful finish not then enough valued in Spain.[798] All his poetry, notwithstanding the accident of his foreign birth, is written in pure and idiomatic Castilian; but the best of it is in the older style,—“the old rhymes,” as he called them,—in which, apparently, he felt more freedom than he did in the manner he subsequently adopted. His Glosses seem to have been most regarded by himself and his friends; and if the nature of the composition itself had been more elevated, they might still deserve the praise they at first received, for he shows great facility and ingenuity in their construction.[799]
His longer narrative poems—those on Daphne and Apollo, and on Pyramus and Thisbe, as well as one he called “The Residence of Love”—are not without merit, though they are among the less fortunate of his efforts. But his canciones are to be ranked with the very best in the language; full of the old true-hearted simplicity of feeling, and yet not without an artifice in their turns of expression, which, far from interfering with their point and effect, adds to both. Thus, one of them begins:—
Your locks are all of gold, my lady,
And of gold each priceless hair;
And the heart is all of steel, my lady,
That sees them without despair.
While a little farther on he gives to the same idea a quaint turn, or answer, such as he delighted to make:—
Not of gold would be your hair, dear lady,
No, not of gold so fair;
But the fine, rich gold itself, dear lady,
That gold would be your hair.[800]
Each is followed by a sort of gloss, or variation of the original air, which again is not without its appropriate merit.
Silvestre was much connected with the poets of his time; not only those of the old school, but those of the Italian, like Diego de Mendoza, Hernando de Acuña, George of Montemayor, and Luis Barahona de Soto. Their poems, in fact, are sometimes found mingled with his own, and their spirit, we see, had a controlling influence over his. But whether, in return, he produced much effect on them, or on his times, may be doubted. He seems to have passed his life quietly in Granada, of whose noble cathedral he was the principal musician, and where he was much valued as a member of society, for his wit and kindly nature. But when he died, at the age of fifty, his poetry was known only in manuscript; and after it was collected and published by his friend Pedro de Caceres, twelve years later, it produced little sensation. He belonged, in truth, to both schools, and was therefore thoroughly admired by neither.[801]
The discussion between the two, however, soon became a formal one. Argote de Molina naturally brought it into his Discourse on Spanish Poetry in 1575,[802] and Montalvo introduced it into his Pastoral, where it little belongs, but where, under assumed names, Cervantes, Ercilla, Castillejo, Silvestre, and Montalvo[803] himself, give their opinions in favor of the old school. This was in 1582. In 1599, Lope de Vega defended the same side in the Preface to his “San Isidro.”[804] But the question was then substantially decided. Five or six long epics, including the “Araucana,” had already been written in the Italian ottava rima; as many pastorals, in imitation of Sannazaro’s; and thousands of verses in the shape of sonnets, canzoni, and the other forms of Italian poetry, a large portion of which had found much favor. Even Lope de Vega, therefore, who is quite decided in his opinion, and wrote his poem of “San Isidro” in the old popular redondillas, fell in with the prevailing fashion, so that, perhaps, in the end, nobody did more than himself to confirm the Italian measures and manner. From this time, therefore, the success of the new school may be considered certain and settled; nor has it ever since been displaced or superseded, as an important division of Spanish literature.