CHAPTER IV.
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza. — His Family. — His Lazarillo de Tórmes, and its Imitations. — His Public Employments and Private Studies. — His Retirement from Affairs. — His Poems and Miscellanies. — His History of the Rebellion of the Moors. — His Death and Character.
Among those who did most to decide the question in favor of the introduction and establishment of the Italian measures in Spanish literature was one whose rank and social position gave him great authority, and whose genius, cultivation, and adventures point alike to his connection with the period we have just gone over and with that on which we are now entering. This person was Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a scholar and a soldier, a poet and a diplomatist, a statesman and an historian,—a man who rose to great consideration in whatever he undertook, and one who was not of a temper to be satisfied with moderate success, wherever he might choose to make an effort.[805]
He was born in Granada in 1503, and his ancestry was perhaps the most illustrious in Spain, if we except the descendants of those who had sat on the thrones of its different kingdoms. Lope de Vega, who turns aside in one of his plays to boast that it was so, adds, that, in his time, the Mendozas counted three-and-twenty generations of the highest nobility and public service.[806] But it is more important for our present purpose to notice that the three immediate ancestors of the distinguished statesman now before us might well have served as examples to form his young character; for he was the third in direct descent from the Marquis of Santillana, the poet and wit of the court of John the Second; his grandfather was the able ambassador of Ferdinand and Isabella, in their troublesome affairs with the See of Rome; and his father, after commanding with distinguished honor in the last great overthrow of the Moors, was made governor of the unquiet city of Granada not long after its surrender.
Diego, however, had five brothers older than himself; and therefore, notwithstanding the power of his family, he was originally destined for the Church, in order to give him more easily the position and income that should sustain his great name with becoming dignity. But his character could not be bent in that direction. He acquired, indeed, much knowledge suited to further his ecclesiastical advancement, both at home, where he learned to speak the Arabic with fluency, and at Salamanca, where he studied Latin, Greek, philosophy, and canon and civil law, with success. But it is evident that he indulged a decided preference for what was more intimately connected with political affairs and elegant literature; and if, as is commonly supposed, he wrote while at the University, or soon afterwards, his “Lazarillo de Tórmes,” it is equally plain that he preferred such a literature as had no relation to theology or the Church.
The Lazarillo is a work of genius, unlike any thing that had preceded it. It is the autobiography of a boy—“little Lazarus”—born in a mill on the banks of the Tórmes, near Salamanca, and sent out by his base and brutal mother as the leader of a blind beggar; the lowest place in the social condition, perhaps, that could then be found in Spain. But such as it is, Lazarillo makes the best or the worst of it. With an inexhaustible fund of good-humor and great quickness of parts, he learns, at once, the cunning and profligacy that qualify him to rise to still greater frauds and a yet wider range of adventures and crimes in the service successively of a priest, a gentleman starving on his own pride, a friar, a seller of indulgences, a chaplain, and an alguazil, until, at last, from the most disgraceful motives, he settles down as a married man; and then the story terminates without reaching any proper conclusion, and without intimating that any is to follow.
Its object is—under the character of a servant with an acuteness that is never at fault, and so small a stock of honesty and truth, that neither of them stands in the way of his success—to give a pungent satire on all classes of society, whose condition Lazarillo well comprehends, because he sees them in undress and behind the scenes. It is written in a very bold, rich, and idiomatic Castilian style, that reminds us of the “Celestina”; and some of its sketches are among the most fresh and spirited that can be found in the whole class of prose works of fiction; so spirited, indeed, and so free, that two of them—those of the friar and the seller of dispensations—were soon put under the ban of the Church, and cut out of the editions that were permitted to be printed under its authority. The whole work is short; but its easy, genial temper, its happy adaptation to Spanish life and manners, and the contrast of the light, good-humored, flexible audacity of Lazarillo himself—a perfectly original conception—with the solemn and unyielding dignity of the old Castilian character, gave it from the first a great popularity. From 1553, when the earliest edition appeared of which we have any knowledge, it was often reprinted, both at home and abroad, and has been more or less a favorite in all languages, down to our own time; becoming the foundation for a class of fictions essentially national, which, under the name of the gusto picaresco, or the style of the rogues, is as well known as any other department of Spanish literature, and one which the “Gil Blas” of Le Sage has made famous throughout the world.[807]
Like other books enjoying a wide reputation, the Lazarillo provoked many imitations. A continuation of it, under the title of “The Second Part of Lazarillo de Tórmes,” soon appeared, longer than the original, and beginning where the fiction of Mendoza leaves off. But it is without merit, except for an occasional quaintness or witticism. It represents Lazarillo as going upon the expedition undertaken by Charles the Fifth against Algiers, in 1541, and as being in one of the vessels that foundered in a storm, which did much towards disconcerting the whole enterprise. From this point, however, Lazarillo’s story becomes a tissue of absurdities. He sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and there creeps into a cave, where he is metamorphosed into a tunny-fish; and the greater part of the work consists of an account of his glory and happiness in the kingdom of the tunnies. At last, he is caught in a seine, and, in the agony of his fear of death, returns, by an effort of his own will, to the human form; after which he finds his way back to Salamanca, and is living there when he prepares this strange account of his adventures.[808]
A further imitation, but not a proper continuation, under the name of “The Lazarillo of the Manzanares,” in which the state of society at Madrid is satirized, was attempted by Juan Cortés de Tolosa, and was first printed in 1620. But it produced no effect at the time, and has been long forgotten. Nor was a much better fate reserved for yet another Second Part of the genuine Lazarillo, which was written by Juan de Luna, a teacher of Spanish at Paris, and appeared there the same year the Lazarillo de Manzanares appeared at Madrid. It is, however, more in the spirit of the original work. It exhibits Lazarillo again as a servant to different kinds of masters, and as gentleman-usher of a poor, proud lady of rank; after which he retires from the world, and, becoming a religious recluse, writes this account of himself, which, though not equal to the free and vigorous sketches of the work it professes to complete, is by no means without value, especially for its style.[809]
The author of the Lazarillo de Tórmes, who, we are told, took the “Amadis” and the “Celestina” for his travelling companions and by-reading,[810] was, as we have intimated, not a person to devote himself to the Church; and we soon hear of him serving as a soldier in the great Spanish armies in Italy; a circumstance to which, in his old age, he alludes with evident pride and pleasure. At those seasons, however, when the troops were unoccupied, we know that he gladly listened to the lectures of the famous professors of Bologna, Padua, and Rome, and added largely to his already large stores of elegant knowledge.
A character so strongly marked would naturally attract the notice of a monarch, vigilant and clear-sighted, like Charles the Fifth; and as early as 1538, Mendoza was made his ambassador to the republic of Venice, then one of the leading powers of Europe. But there, too, though much busied with grave negotiations, he loved to be familiar with men of letters. The Aldi were then at the height of their reputation, and he assisted and patronized them. Paulus Manutius dedicated to him an edition of the philosophical works of Cicero, acknowledging his skill as a critic and praising his Latinity, though, at the same time, he says that Mendoza rather exhorted the young to study philosophy and science in their native languages;—a proof of liberality rare in an age when the admiration for the ancients led a great number of classical scholars to treat whatever was modern and vernacular with contempt. At one period, he gave himself up to the pursuit of Greek and Latin literature with a zeal such as Petrarch had shown long before him. He sent to Thessaly and the famous convent of Mount Athos, to collect Greek manuscripts. Josephus was first printed complete from his library, and so were some of the Fathers of the Church. And when, on one occasion, he had done so great a favor to the Sultan Soliman that he was invited to demand any return from that monarch’s gratitude, the only reward he would consent to receive for himself was a present of some Greek manuscripts, which, as he said, amply repaid all his services.
But, in the midst of studies so well suited to his taste and character, the Emperor called him away to more important duties. He was made military governor of Siena, and required to hold both the Pope and the Florentines in check; a duty which he fulfilled, though not without peril to his life. Somewhat later he was sent to the great Council of Trent, known as a political no less than an ecclesiastical congress, in order to sustain the Imperial interests there, and succeeded, by the exercise of a degree of firmness, address, and eloquence which would alone have made him one of the most considerable persons in the Spanish monarchy. While at the Council, however, in consequence of the urgency of affairs, he was despatched, as a special Imperial plenipotentiary to Rome, in 1547, for the bold purpose of confronting and overawing the Pope in his own capital. And in this, too, he succeeded; rebuking Julius the Third in open council, and so establishing his own consideration, as well as that of his country, that for six years afterwards he is to be looked upon as the head of the Imperial party throughout Italy, and almost as a viceroy governing that country, or a large part of it, for the Emperor, by his talents and firmness. But at last he grew weary of this great labor and burden; and the Emperor himself having changed his system and determined to conciliate Europe before he should abdicate, Mendoza returned to Spain in 1554.[811]
The next year, Philip the Second ascended the throne. His policy, however, little resembled that of his father, and Mendoza was not one of those who were well suited to the changed state of things. In consequence of this, he seldom came to court, and was not at all favored by the severe master who now ruled him, as he ruled all the other great men of his kingdom, with a hard and anxious tyranny.[812] One instance of his displeasure against Mendoza, and of the harsh treatment that followed it, is sufficiently remarkable. The ambassador, who, though sixty-four years of age when the event occurred, had lost little of the fire of his youth, fell into a passionate dispute with a courtier in the palace itself. The latter drew a dagger, and Mendoza wrested it from him and threw it out of the balcony where they were standing;—some accounts adding, that he afterwards threw out the courtier himself. Such a quarrel would certainly be accounted an affront to the royal dignity anywhere; but in the eyes of the formal and strict Philip the Second it was all but a mortal offence. He chose to have Mendoza regarded as a madman, and as such exiled him from his court;—an injustice against which the old man struggled in vain for some time, and then yielded himself up to it with loyal dignity.
His amusement during some portion of his exile was—singular as it may seem in one so old—to write poetry.[813] But the occupation had long been familiar to him. In the first edition of the works of Boscan we have an epistle from Mendoza to that poet, evidently written when he was young; besides which, several of his shorter pieces contain internal proof that they were composed in Italy. But, notwithstanding he had been so long in Venice and Rome, and notwithstanding Boscan must have been among his earliest friends, he does not belong entirely to the Italian school of poetry; for, though he has often imitated and fully sanctioned the Italian measures, he often gave himself up to the old redondillas and quintillas, and to the national tone of feeling and reflection appropriate to these ancient forms of Castilian verse.[814]
The truth is, Mendoza had studied the ancients with a zeal and success that had so far imbued his mind with their character and temper, as in some measure to keep out all undue modern influences. The first part of the Epistle to Boscan, already alluded to, though written in flowing terza rima, sounds almost like a translation of the Epistle of Horace to Numicius, and yet it is not even a servile imitation; while the latter part is absolutely Spanish, and gives such a description of domestic life as never entered the imagination of antiquity.[815] The Hymn in honor of Cardinal Espinosa, one of the most finished of his poems, is said to have been written after five days’ constant reading of Pindar, but is nevertheless full of the old Castilian spirit;[816] and his second cancion, though quite in the Italian measure, shows the turns of Horace more than of Petrarch.[817] Still, it is not to be concealed that Mendoza gave the decisive influence of his example to the new forms introduced by Boscan and Garcilasso;—a fact plain from the manner in which that example is appealed to by many of the poets of his time, and especially by Gregorio Silvestre and Christóval de Mesa.[818] In both styles, however, he succeeded. There is, perhaps, more richness of thought in the specimens he has given us in the Italian measures than in the others; yet it can hardly be doubted that his heart was in what he wrote upon the old popular foundations. Some of his letrillas, as they would now be called, though they bore different names in his time, are quite charming;[819] and in many parts of the second division of his poems, which is larger than that devoted to the Italian measures, there is a light and idle humor, well fitted to his subjects, and such as might have been anticipated from the author of the “Lazarillo” rather than from the Imperial representative at the Council of Trent and the Papal court. Indeed, some of his verses were so free, that it was thought inexpedient to print them.
The same spirit is apparent in two prose letters, or rather essays thrown into the shape of letters. The first professes to come from a person seeking employment at court, and gives an account of the whole class of Catariberas, or low courtiers, who, in soiled clothes and with base, fawning manners, daily besieged the doors and walks of the President of the Council of Castile, in order to solicit some one of the multitudinous humble offices in his gift. The other is addressed to Pedro de Salazar, ridiculing a book he had published on the wars of the Emperor in Germany, in which, as Mendoza declares, the author took more credit to himself personally than he deserved. Both are written with idiomatic humor, and a native buoyancy and gayety of spirit which seem to have lain at the bottom of his character, and to have broken forth, from time to time, during his whole life, notwithstanding the severe employments which for so many years filled and burdened his thoughts.[820]
The tendency of his mind, however, as he grew old, was naturally to graver subjects; and finding there was no hope of his being recalled to court, he established himself in unambitious retirement at Granada, his native city. But his spirit was not one that would easily sink into inactivity; and if it had been, he had not chosen a home that would encourage such a disposition. For it was a spot, not only full of romantic recollections, but intimately associated with the glory of his own family,—one where he had spent much of his youth, and become familiar with those remains and ruins of the Moorish power which bore witness to days when the plain of Granada was the seat of one of the most luxurious and splendid of the Mohammedan dynasties. Here, therefore, he naturally turned to the early studies of his half-Arabian education, and, arranging his library of curious Moorish manuscripts, devoted himself to the literature and history of his native city, until, at last, apparently from want of other occupation, he determined to write a part of its annals.
The portion he chose was one very recent; that of the rebellion raised by the Moors in 1568-1570, when they were no longer able to endure the oppression of Philip the Second; and it is much to Mendoza’s honor, that, with sympathies entirely Spanish, he has yet done the hated enemies of his faith and people such generous justice, that his book could not be published till many years after his own death,—not, indeed, till the unhappy Moors themselves had been finally expelled from Spain. His means for writing such a work were remarkable. His father, as we have noticed, had been a general in the conquering army of 1492, to which the story of this rebellion necessarily often recurs, and had afterward been governor of Granada. One of his nephews had commanded the troops in this very war. And now, after peace was restored by the submission of the rebels, the old statesman, as he stood amidst the trophies and ruins of the conflict, soon learned from eyewitnesses and partisans whatever of interest had happened on either side that he had not himself seen. Familiar, therefore, with every thing of which he speaks, there is a freshness and power in his sketches that carry us at once into the midst of the scenes and events he describes, and make us sympathize in details too minute to be always interesting, if they were not always marked with the impress of a living reality.[821]
But though his history springs, as it were, vigorously from the very soil to which it relates, it is a sedulous and well-considered imitation of the ancient masters, and entirely unlike the chronicling spirit of the preceding period. The genius of antiquity, indeed, is announced in its first sentence.
“My purpose,” says the old soldier, “is to record that war of Granada which the Catholic King of Spain, Don Philip the Second, son of the unconquered Emperor Don Charles, maintained in the kingdom of Granada, against the newly converted rebels; a part whereof I saw, and a part heard from persons who carried it on by their arms and by their counsels.”
Sallust was undoubtedly Mendoza’s model. Like the War against Catiline, the War of the Moorish Insurrection is a small work, and like that, too, its style is generally rich and bold. But sometimes long passages are evidently imitated from Tacitus, whose vigor and severity the wise diplomatist seems to approach as nearly as he does the more exuberant style of his prevalent master. Some of these imitations are as happy, perhaps, as any that can be produced from the class to which they belong; for they are often no less unconstrained than if they were quite original. Take, for instance, the following passage, which has often been noticed for its spirit and feeling, but which is partly a translation from the account given by Tacitus, in his most picturesque and condensed manner, of the visit made by Germanicus and his army to the spot where lay, unburied, the remains of the three legions of Varus, in the forests of Germany, and of the funeral honors that army paid to the memory of their fallen and almost forgotten countrymen;—the circumstance described by the Spanish historian being so remarkably similar to that given in the Annals of Tacitus, that the imitation is perfectly natural.[822]
During a rebellion of the Moors in 1500-1501, it was thought of consequence to destroy a fort in the mountains that lay towards Málaga. The service was dangerous, and none came forward to undertake it, until Alonso de Aguilar, one of the principal nobles in the service of Ferdinand and Isabella, offered himself for the enterprise. His attempt, as had been foreseen, failed, and hardly a man survived to relate the details of the disaster; but Aguilar’s enthusiasm and self-devotion created a great sensation at the time, and were afterwards recorded in more than one of the old ballads of the country.[823]
At the period, however, when Mendoza touches on this unhappy defeat, nearly seventy years had elapsed, and the bones of both Spaniards and Moors still lay whitening on the spot where they had fallen. The war between the two races was again renewed by the insurrection of the conquered; a military expedition was again undertaken into the same mountains; and the Duke of Arcos, its leader, was a lineal descendant of some who had fallen there, and intimately connected with the family of Alonso de Aguilar himself. While, therefore, the troops for this expedition were collecting, the Duke, from a natural curiosity and interest in what so nearly concerned him, took a small body of soldiers and visited the melancholy spot.
“The Duke left Casares,” says Mendoza, “examining and securing the passes of the mountains as he went; a needful providence, on account of the little certainty there is of success in all military adventures. They then began to ascend the range of heights where it was said the bodies had remained unburied, melancholy and loathsome alike to the sight and the memory.[824] For there were among those who now visited it both kinsmen and descendants of the slain, or men who knew by report whatever related to the sad scene. And first they came to the spot where the vanguard had stopped with its leader, in consequence of the darkness of the night; a broad opening between the foot of the mountain and the Moorish fortress, without defence of any sort but such as was afforded by the nature of the place. Here lay human skulls and the bones of horses, heaped confusedly together or scattered about, just as they had chanced to fall, mingled with fragments of arms and bridles and the rich trappings of the cavalry.[825] Farther on, they found the fort of the enemy, of which there were now only a few low remains, nearly levelled with the surface of the soil. And then they went forward, talking about the places where officers, leaders, and common soldiers had perished together; relating how and where those who survived had been saved, among whom were the Count of Ureña and Pedro de Aguilar, elder son of Don Alonso; speaking of the spot where Don Alonso had retired and defended himself between two rocks; the wound the Moorish captain first gave him on the head, and then another in the breast as he fell; the words he uttered as they closed in the fight, ‘I am Don Alonso,’ and the answer of the chieftain as he struck him down, ‘You are Don Alonso, but I am the chieftain of Benastepár’; and of the wounds Don Alonso gave, which were not fatal, as were those he received. They remembered, too, how friends and enemies had alike mourned his fate; and now, on that same spot, the same sorrow was renewed by the soldiers,—a race sparing of its gratitude, except in tears. The general commanded a service to be performed for the dead; and the soldiers present offered up prayers that they might rest in peace, uncertain whether they interceded for their kinsmen or for their enemies,—a feeling which increased their rage and the eagerness they felt for finding those upon whom they could now take vengeance.”[826]
There are several instances like this, in the course of the work, that show how well pleased Mendoza was to step aside into an episode and indulge himself in appropriate ornaments of his subject. The main direction of his story, however, is never unnaturally deviated from; and wherever he goes, he is almost always powerful and effective. Take, for example, the following speech of El Zaguer, one of the principal conspirators, exciting his countrymen to break out into open rebellion, by exposing to them the long series of affronts and cruelties they had suffered from their Spanish oppressors. It reminds us of the speeches of the indignant Carthaginian leaders in Livy.
“Seeing,” says the historian, “that the greatness of the undertaking brought with it hesitation, delays, and exposure to accident and change of opinion, this conspirator collected the principal men together in the house of Zinzan in the Albaycin, and addressed them, setting forth the oppression they had constantly endured, at the hands both of public officers and private persons, till they were become, he said, no less slaves than if they had been formally made such,—their wives, children, estates, and even their own persons, being in the power and at the mercy of their enemies, without the hope of seeing themselves freed from such servitude for centuries,—exposed to as many tyrants as they had neighbours, and suffering constantly new impositions and new taxes,—deprived of the right of sanctuary in places where those take refuge who, through accident or (what is deemed among them the more justifiable cause) through revenge, commit crime,—thrust out from the protection of the very churches at whose religious rites we are yet required, under severe penalties, to be present,—subjected to the priests to enrich them, and yet held to be unworthy of favor from God or men,—treated and regarded as Moors among Christians, that we may be despised, and as Christians among Moors, that we may neither be believed nor consoled. ‘They have excluded us, too,’ he went on, ‘from life and human intercourse; for they forbid us to speak our own language, and we do not understand theirs. In what way, then, are we to communicate with others, or ask or give what life requires,—cut off from the conversation of men, and denied what is not denied even to the brutes? And yet may not he who speaks Castilian still hold to the law of the Prophet, and may not he who speaks Moorish hold to the law of Jesus? They force our children into their religious houses and schools, and teach them arts which our fathers forbade us to learn, lest the purity of our own law should be corrupted, and its very truth be made a subject of doubt and quarrels. They threaten, too, to tear these our children from the arms of their mothers and the protection of their fathers, and send them into foreign lands, where they shall forget our manners, and become the enemies of those to whom they owe their existence. They command us to change our dress and wear clothes like the Castilians. Yet among themselves the Germans dress in one fashion, the French in another, and the Greeks in another; their friars, too, and their young men, and their old men, have all separate costumes; each nation, each profession, each class, has its own peculiar dress, and still all are Christians;—while we—we Moors—are not to be allowed to dress like Moors, as if we wore our faith in our raiment and not in our hearts.’”[827]
This is certainly picturesque; and so is the greater part of the whole history, both from its subject and from the manner in which it is treated. Nor is it lacking in dignity and elevation. Its style is bold and abrupt, but true to the idiom of the language; and the current of thought is deep and strong, easily carrying the reader onward with its flood. Nothing in the old chronicling style of the earlier period is to be compared to it, and little in any subsequent period is equal to it for manliness, vigor, and truth.[828]
The War of Granada is the last literary labor its author undertook. He was, indeed, above seventy years old when he finished it; and, perhaps to signify that he now renounced the career of letters, he collected his library, both the classics and manuscripts he had procured with so much trouble in Italy and Greece, and the curious Arabic works he had found in Granada, and presented the whole to his severe sovereign for his favorite establishment of the Escurial, among whose untold treasures they still hold a prominent place. At any rate, after this, we hear nothing of the old statesman, except that, for some reason or other, Philip the Second permitted him to come to court again; and that, a few days after he arrived at Madrid, he was seized with a violent illness, of which he died in April, 1575, seventy-two years old.[829]
On whatever side we regard the character of Mendoza, we feel sure that he was an extraordinary man; but the combination of his powers is, after all, what is most to be wondered at. In all of them, however, and especially in the union of a life of military adventure and active interest in affairs with a sincere love of learning and elegant letters, he showed himself to be a genuine Spaniard;—the elements of greatness which his various fortunes had thus unfolded within him being all among the elements of Spanish national poetry and eloquence, in their best age and most generous development. The loyal old knight, therefore, may well stand forward with those who, first in the order of time, as well as of merit, are to constitute that final school of Spanish literature which was built on the safe foundations of the national genius and character, and can, therefore, never be shaken by the floods or convulsions of the ages that may come after it.