CHAPTER V.
Didactic Poetry. — Luis de Escobar. — Corelas. — Torre. — Didactic Prose. — Villalobos. — Oliva. — Sedeño. — Salazar. — Luis Mexia. — Pedro Mexia. — Navarra. — Urrea. — Palacios Rubios. — Vanegas. — Juan de Avila. — Antonio de Guevara. — Diálogo de las Lenguas. — Progress of the Castilian from the Time of John the Second to that of the Emperor Charles the Fifth.
While an Italian spirit, or, at least, an observance of Italian forms, was beginning so decidedly to prevail in Spanish lyric and pastoral poetry, what was didactic, whether in prose or verse, took directions somewhat different.
In didactic poetry, among other forms, the old one of question and answer, known from the age of Juan de Mena, and found in the Cancioneros as late as Badajoz, continued to enjoy much favor. Originally, such questions seem to have been riddles and witticisms; but in the sixteenth century they gradually assumed a graver character, and at last claimed to be directly and absolutely didactic, constituting a form in which two remarkable books of light and easy verse were produced. The first of these books is called “The Four Hundred Answers to as many Questions of the Illustrious Don Fadrique Enriquez, the Admiral of Castile, and other Persons.” It was printed three times in 1545, the year in which it first appeared, and had undoubtedly a great success in the class of society to which it was addressed, and whose manners and opinions it strikingly illustrates. It contains at least twenty thousand verses, and was followed, in 1552, by another similar volume, partly in prose, and promising a third, which, however, was never published. Except five hundred proverbs, as they are inappropriately called, at the end of the first volume, and fifty glosses at the end of the second, the whole consists of such ingenious questions as a distinguished old nobleman in the reign of Charles the Fifth and his friends might imagine it would amuse or instruct them to have solved. They are on subjects as various as possible,—religion, morals, history, medicine, magic,—in short, whatever could occur to idle and curious minds; but they were all sent to an acute, good-humored Minorite friar, Luis de Escobar, who, being bed-ridden with the gout and other grievous maladies, had nothing better to do than to answer them.
His answers form the body of the work. Some of them are wise and some foolish, some are learned and some absurd; but they all bear the impression of their age. Once we have a long letter of advice about a godly life, sent to the Admiral, which, no doubt, was well suited to his case; and repeatedly we get complaints from the old monk himself of his sufferings, and accounts of what he was doing; so that from different parts of the two volumes it would be possible to collect a tolerably distinct picture of the amusements of society, if not its occupations, about the court, at the period when they were written. The poetry is in many respects not unlike that of Tusser, who was contemporary with Escobar, but it is better and more spirited.[830]
The second book of questions and answers to which we have referred is graver than the first. It was printed the next year after the great success of Escobar’s work, and is called “Three Hundred Questions concerning Natural Subjects, with their Answers,” by Alonso Lopez de Corelas, a physician, who had more learning, perhaps, than the monk he imitated, but is less amusing, and writes in verses neither so well constructed nor so agreeable.[831]
Others followed, like Gonzalez de la Torre, who in 1590 dedicated to the heir-apparent of the Spanish throne a volume of such dull religious riddles as were admired a century before.[832] But nobody, who wrote in this peculiar didactic style of verse, equalled Escobar, and it soon passed out of general notice and regard.[833]
In prose, about the same time, a fashion appeared of imitating the Roman didactic prose-writers, just as those writers had been imitated by Castiglione, Bembo, Giovanni della Casa, and others in Italy. The impulse seems plainly to have been communicated to Spain by the moderns, and not by the ancients. It was because the Italians led the way that the Romans were imitated, and not because the example of Cicero and Seneca had, of itself, been able to form a prose school, of any kind, beyond the Pyrenees.[834] The fashion was not one of so much importance and influence as that introduced into the poetry of the nation; but it is worthy of notice, both on account of its results during the reign of Charles the Fifth, and on account of an effect more or less distinct which it had on the prose style of the nation afterwards.
The eldest among the prominent writers produced by this state of things was Francisco de Villalobos, of whom we know little, except that he belonged to a family which, for several successive generations, had been devoted to the medical art; that he was himself the physician, first of Ferdinand the Catholic,[835] and then of Charles the Fifth; that he published, as early as 1498, a poem on his own science, in five hundred stanzas, founded on the rules of Avicenna;[836] and that he continued to be known as an author, chiefly on subjects connected with his profession, till 1543, before which time he had become weary of the court, and sought a voluntary retirement, where he died, above seventy years old.[837] His translation of the “Amphitryon” of Plautus belongs rather to the theatre, but, like that of Oliva, soon to be mentioned, produced no effect there, and, like his scientific treatises, demands no especial notice. The rest of his works, including all that belong to the department of elegant literature, are to be found in a volume of moderate size, which he dedicated to the Infante Don Luis of Portugal.
The chief of them is called “Problems,” and is divided into two tractates;—the first, which is very short, being on the Sun, the Planets, the Four Elements, and the Terrestrial Paradise; and the last, which is longer, on Man and Morals, beginning with an essay on Satan, and ending with one on Flattery and Flatterers, which is especially addressed to the heir-apparent of the crown of Spain, afterwards Philip the Second. Each of these subdivisions, in each tractate, has eight lines of the old Spanish verse prefixed to it, as its Problem, or text, and the prose discussion which follows, like a gloss, constitutes the substance of the work. The whole is of a very miscellaneous character; most of it grave, like the essays on Knights and Prelates, but some of it amusing, like an essay on the Marriage of Old Men.[838] The best portions are those that have a satirical vein in them; such as the ridicule of litigious old men, and of old men that wear paint.[839]
A Dialogue on Intermittent Fevers, a Dialogue on the Natural Heat of the Body, and a Dialogue between the Doctor and the Duke, his patient, are all quite in the manner of the contemporary didactic discussions of the Italians, except that the last contains passages of a broad and free humor, approaching more nearly to the tone of comedy, or rather of farce.[840] A treatise that follows, on the Three Great Annoyances of much talking, much disputing, and much laughing,[841] and a grave discourse on Love, with which the volume ends, are all that remain worth notice. They have the same general characteristics with the rest of his miscellanies; the style of some portions of them being distinguished by more purity and more pretensions to dignity than have been found in the earlier didactic prose-writers, and especially by greater clearness and exactness of expression. Occasionally, too, we meet with an idiomatic familiarity, frankness, and spirit that are very attractive, and that partly compensate us for the absurdities of the old and forgotten doctrines in natural history and medicine, which Villalobos inculcated because they were the received doctrines of his time.
The next writer of the same class, and, on the whole, one much more worthy of consideration, is Fernan Perez de Oliva, a Cordovese, who was born about 1492, and died, still young, in 1530. His father was a lover of letters; and the son, as he himself informs us, was educated with care from his earliest youth. At twelve years of age, he was already a student in the University of Salamanca; after which he went, first, to Alcalá, when it was in the beginning of its glory; then to Paris, whose University had long attracted students from every part of Europe; and finally to Rome, where, under the protection of an uncle at the court of Leo the Tenth, all the advantages to be found in the most cultivated capital of Christendom were accessible to him.
On his uncle’s death, it was proposed to him to take the offices left vacant by that event; but, loving letters more than courtly honors, he went back to Paris, where he taught and lectured in its University for three years. Another Pope, Adrian the Sixth, was now on the throne, and, hearing of Oliva’s success, endeavoured anew to draw him to Rome; but the love of his country and of literature continued to be stronger than the love of ecclesiastical preferment. He returned, therefore, to Salamanca; became one of the original members of the rich “College of the Archbishop,” founded in 1528; and was successively chosen Professor of Ethics in the University, and its Rector. But he had hardly risen to his highest distinctions, when he died suddenly, and at a moment when so many hopes rested on him, that his death was felt as a misfortune to the cause of letters throughout Spain.[842]
Oliva’s studies at Rome had taught him how successfully the Latin writers had been imitated by the Italians, and he became anxious that they should be no less successfully imitated by the Spaniards. He felt it as a wrong done to his native language, that almost all serious prose discussions in Spain were still carried on in Latin rather than in Spanish.[843] Taking a hint, then, from Castiglione’s “Cortigiano,” and opposing the current of opinion among the learned men with whom he lived and acted, he began a didactic dialogue on the Dignity of Man, formally defending it as a work in the Spanish language written by a Spaniard. Besides this, he wrote several strictly didactic discourses;—one on the Faculties of the Mind and their Proper Use; another urging Córdova, his native city, to improve the navigation of the Guadalquivir, and so obtain a portion of the rich commerce of the Indies, which was then monopolized by Seville; and another, that was delivered at Salamanca, when he was a candidate for the chair of moral philosophy;—in all which his nephew, Morales, the historian, assures us it was his uncle’s strong desire to furnish practical examples of the power and resources of the Spanish language.[844]
The purpose of giving greater dignity to his native tongue, by employing it, instead of the Latin, on all the chief subjects of human inquiry, was certainly a fortunate one in Oliva, and soon found imitators. Juan de Sedeño published, in 1536, two prose dialogues on Love and one on Happiness; the former in a more graceful tone of gallantry, and the latter in a more philosophical spirit and with more terseness of manner, than belonged to the age.[845] Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, a man of learning, completed the dialogue of Oliva on the Dignity of Man, which had been left unfinished, and, dedicating it to Fernando Cortés, published it in 1546,[846] together with a long prose fable by Luis Mexia, on Idleness and Labor, written in a pure and somewhat elevated style, but too much indebted to the “Vision” of the Bachiller de la Torre.[847] Pedro de Navarra published, in 1567, forty Moral Dialogues, partly the result of conversations held in an Academia of distinguished persons, who met, from time to time, at the house of Fernando Cortés.[848] Pedro Mexia, the chronicler, wrote a Silva, or Miscellany, divided, in the later editions, into six books, and subdivided into a multitude of separate essays, historical and moral; declaring it to be the first work of the kind in Spanish, which, he says, he considers quite as suitable for such discussions as the Italian.[849] To this, which may be regarded as an imitation of Macrobius or of Athenæus, and which was printed in 1543, he added, in 1547, six didactic dialogues,—curious, but of little value,—in the first of which the advantages and disadvantages of having regular physicians are agreeably set forth, with a lightness and exactness of style hardly to have been expected.[850] And finally, to complete the short list, Urrea, a favored soldier of the Emperor, and at one time viceroy of Apulia,—the same person who made the poor translation of Ariosto mentioned in Don Quixote,—published, in 1566, a Dialogue on True Military Honor, which is written in a pleasant and easy style, and contains, mingled with the notions of one who says he trained himself for glory by reading romances of chivalry, not a few amusing anecdotes of duels and military adventures.[851]
Both of the works of Pedro Mexia, but especially his Silva, enjoyed no little popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and, in point of style, they are certainly not without merit. None, however, of the productions of any one of the authors last mentioned had so much force and character as the first part of the Dialogue on the Dignity of Man. And yet Oliva was certainly not a person of a commanding genius. His imagination never warms into poetry; his invention is never sufficient to give new and strong views to his subject; and his system of imitating both the Latin and the Italian masters rather tends to debilitate than to impart vigor to his thoughts. But there is a general reasonableness and wisdom in what he says that win and often satisfy us, and these, with his style, which, though sometimes declamatory, is yet, on the whole, pure and well settled, and his happy idea of defending and employing the Castilian, then coming into all its rights as a living language, have had the effect of giving him a more lasting reputation than that of any other Spanish prose-writer of his time.[852]
The same general tendency to a more formal and elegant style of discussion is found in a few other ethical and religious authors of the reign of Charles the Fifth that are still remembered; such as Palacios Rubios, who wrote an essay on Military Courage, for the benefit of his son;[853] Vanegas, who, under the title of “The Agony of Passing through Death,” gives us what may rather be considered an ascetic treatise on holy living;[854] and Juan de Avila, sometimes called the Apostle of Andalusia, whose letters are fervent exhortations to virtue and religion, composed with care and often with eloquence, if not with entire purity of style.[855]
The author in this class, however, who during his lifetime had the most influence was Antonio de Guevara, one of the official chroniclers of Charles the Fifth. He was a Biscayan by birth, and passed some of his earlier years at the court of Queen Isabella. In 1528 he became a Franciscan monk, but, enjoying the favor of the Emperor, he seems to have been transformed into a thorough courtier, accompanying his master during his journeys and residences in Italy and other parts of Europe, and rising successively, by the royal patronage, to be court preacher, Imperial historiographer, Bishop of Guadix, and Bishop of Mondoñedo. He died in 1545.[856]
His works were not numerous, but they were fitted to the atmosphere in which they were produced and enjoyed at once a great popularity. His “Dial for Princes, or Marcus Aurelius,” first published in 1529, and the fruit, as he tells us, of eleven years’ labor,[857] was not only often reprinted in Spanish, but was translated into Latin, Italian, French, and English; in each of which last two languages it appeared many times before the end of the century.[858] It is a kind of romance, founded on the life and character of Marcus Aurelius, and resembles, in some points, the “Cyropædia” of Xenophon; its purpose being to place before the Emperor Charles the Fifth the model of a prince more perfect for wisdom and virtue than any other of antiquity. But the Bishop of Mondoñedo adventured beyond his prerogative. He pretended that his Marcus Aurelius was genuine history, and appealed to a manuscript in Florence, which did not exist, as if he had done little more than make a translation of it. In consequence of this, Pedro de Rua, a professor of elegant literature in the college at Soria, addressed a letter to him, in 1540, exposing the fraud. Two other letters followed, written with more freedom and purity of style than any thing in the works of the Bishop himself, and leaving him no real ground on which to stand.[859] He, however, defended himself as well as he was able; at first cautiously, but afterwards, when he was more closely assailed, by assuming the wholly untenable position, that all ancient profane history was no more true than his romance of Marcus Aurelius, and that he had as good a right to invent for his own high purposes as Herodotus or Livy. From this time he was severely attacked; more so, perhaps, than he would have been, if the gross frauds of Annius of Viterbo had not then been recent. But however this may be, it was done with a bitterness that forms a strong contrast to the applause bestowed in France, near the end of the eighteenth century, upon a somewhat similar work on the same subject by Thomas.[860]
After all, however, the “Dial for Princes” is little worthy of the excitement it occasioned. It is filled with letters and speeches ill conceived and inappropriate; and is written in a formal and inflated style. Perhaps we are now indebted to it for nothing so much as for the beautiful fable of “The Peasant of the Danube,” evidently suggested to La Fontaine by one of the discourses through which Guevara endeavoured to give life and reality to his fictions.[861]
In the same spirit, though with less boldness, he wrote his “Lives of the Ten Roman Emperors”; a work which, like his Dial for Princes, he dedicated to Charles the Fifth. In general, he has here followed the authorities on which he claims to found his narrative, such as Dion Cassius and the minor Latin historians, showing, at the same time, a marked desire to imitate Plutarch and Suetonius, whom he announces as his models. But he has not been able entirely to resist the temptation of inserting fictitious letters, and even unfounded stories; thus giving a false view, if not of the facts of history, at least of some of the characters he records. His style, however, though it still wants purity and appropriateness, is better and more simple than it is in his romance on Marcus Aurelius.[862]
Similar characteristics mark a large collection of Letters printed by him as early as 1539. Many of them are addressed to persons of great consideration in his time, such as the Marquis of Pescara, the Duke of Alva, Iñigo de Velasco, Grand Constable of Castile, and Fadrique Enriquez, Grand Admiral. But some were evidently never sent to the persons addressed, like the loyal one to Juan de Padilla, the head of the Comuneros, and two impertinent letters to the Governor Luis Bravo, who had foolishly fallen in love in his old age. Others are mere fictions; among which are a correspondence of the Emperor Trajan with Plutarch and the Roman Senate, which Guevara vainly protests he translated from the Greek, without saying where he found the originals,[863] and a long epistle about Laïs and other courtesans of antiquity, in which he gives the details of their conversations as if he had listened to them himself. Most of the letters, though they are called “Familiar Epistles,” are merely essays or disputations, and a few are sermons in form, with an announcement of the occasions on which they were preached. None has the easy or natural air of a real correspondence. In fact, they were all, no doubt, prepared expressly for publication and for effect; and, notwithstanding their stiffness and formality, were greatly admired. They were often printed in Spain; they were translated into all the principal languages of Europe; and, to express the value set on them, they were generally called “The Golden Epistles.” But notwithstanding their early success, they have long been disregarded, and only a few passages that touch the affairs of the time or the life of the Emperor can now be read with interest or pleasure.[864]
Besides these works, Guevara wrote several formal treatises. Two are strictly theological.[865] Another is on the Inventors of the Art of Navigation and its Practice;—a subject which might be thought foreign from the Bishop’s experience, but with which, he tells us, he had become familiar by having been much at sea, and visited many ports on the Mediterranean.[866] Of his two other treatises, which are all that remain to be noticed, one is called “Contempt of Court Life and Praise of the Country”; and the other, “Counsels for Favorites, and Teachings for Courtiers.” They are moral discussions, suggested by Castiglione’s “Courtier,” then at the height of its popularity, and are written with great elaborateness, in a solemn and stiff style, bearing the same relations to truth and wisdom that Arcadian pastorals do to nature.[867]
All the works of Guevara show the impress of their age, and mark their author’s position at court. They are burdened with learning, yet not without proofs of experience in the ways of the world;—they often show good sense, but they are monotonous from the stately dignity he thinks it necessary to assume on his own account, and from the rhetorical ornament by which he hopes to commend them to the regard of his readers. Such as they are, however, they illustrate and exemplify, more truly, perhaps, than any thing else of their age, the style of writing most in favor at the court of Charles the Fifth, especially during the latter part of that monarch’s reign.
But by far the best didactic prose work of this period, though unknown and unpublished till two centuries afterwards, is that commonly cited under the simple title of “The Dialogue on Languages”;—a work which, at any time, would be deemed remarkable for the naturalness and purity of its style, and is peculiarly so at this period of formal and elaborate eloquence. “I write,” says its author, “as I speak; only I take more pains to think what I have to say, and then I say it as simply as I can; for, to my mind, affectation is out of place in all languages.” Who it was that entertained an opinion so true, but in his time so uncommon, is not certain. Probably it was Juan Valdés, a person who enjoys the distinction of being one of the first Spaniards that embraced the opinions of the Reformation, and the very first who made an effort to spread them. He was educated at the University of Alcalá, and during a part of his life possessed not a little political consequence, being much about the person of the Emperor, and sent by him to act as secretary and adviser to Toledo, the great viceroy of Naples. It is not known what became of him afterwards; but he died in 1540, six years before Charles the Fifth attempted to establish the Inquisition in Naples; and therefore it is not likely that he was seriously molested while he was in office there.[868]
The Dialogue on Languages is supposed to be carried on between two Spaniards and two Italians, at a country-house on the sea-shore, near Naples, and is an acute discussion on the origin and character of the Castilian. Parts of it are learned, but in these the author sometimes falls into errors;[869] other parts are lively and entertaining; and yet others are full of good sense and sound criticism. The principal personage—the one who gives all the instructions and explanations—is named Valdés; and from this circumstance, as well as from some intimations in the Dialogue itself, it may be inferred that the reformer was its author, and that it was written before 1536;[870]—a point which, if established, would account for the suppression of the manuscript, as the work of an adherent of Luther. In any event, the Dialogue was not printed till 1737, and therefore, as a specimen of pure and easy style, was lost on the age that produced it.[871]
For us it is important, because it shows, with more distinctness than any other literary monument of its time, what was the state of the Spanish language in the reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth; a circumstance of consequence to the condition of the literature, and one to which we therefore turn with interest.
As might be expected, we find, when we look back, that the language of letters in Spain has made material progress since we last noticed it in the reign of John the Second. The example of Juan de Mena had been followed, and the national vocabulary enriched during the interval of a century, by successive poets, from the languages of classical antiquity. From other sources, too, and through other channels, important contributions had flowed in. From America and its commerce had come the names of those productions which half a century of intercourse had brought to Spain, and rendered familiar there,—terms few, indeed, in number, but of daily use.[872] From Germany and the Low Countries still more had been introduced by the accession of Charles the Fifth,[873] who, to the great annoyance of his Spanish subjects, arrived in Spain surrounded by foreign courtiers, and speaking with a stranger accent the language of the country he was called to govern.[874] A few words, too, had come accidentally from France; and now, in the reign of Philip the Second, a great number, amounting to the most considerable infusion the language had received since the time of the Arabs, were brought in through the intimate connection of Spain with Italy and the increasing influence of Italian letters and Italian culture.[875]
We may therefore consider that the Spanish language at this period was not only formed, but that it had reached substantially its full proportions, and had received all its essential characteristics. Indeed, it had already for half a century been regularly cared for and cultivated. Alonso de Palencia, who had long been in the service of his country as an ambassador, and was afterwards its chronicler, published a Latin and Spanish Dictionary in 1490; the oldest in which a Castilian vocabulary is to be found.[876] This was succeeded, two years later, by the first Castilian Grammar, the work of Antonio de Lebrixa, who had before published a Latin Grammar in the Latin language, and translated it for the benefit, as he tells us, of the ladies of the court.[877] Other similar and equally successful attempts followed. A purely Spanish Dictionary by Lebrixa, the first of its kind, appeared in 1492, and a Dictionary for ecclesiastical purposes, in both Latin and Spanish, by Santa Ella, succeeded it in 1499; both often reprinted afterwards, and long regarded as standard authorities.[878] All these works, so important for the consolidation of the language, and so well constructed that successors to them were not found till above a century later,[879] were, it should be observed, produced under the direct and personal patronage of Queen Isabella, who in this, as in so many other ways, gave proof at once of her far-sightedness in affairs of state, and of her wise tastes and preferences in whatever regarded the intellectual cultivation of her subjects.[880]
The language thus formed was now fast spreading throughout the kingdom, and displacing dialects some of which, as old as itself, had seemed, at one period, destined to surpass it in cultivation and general prevalence. The ancient Galician, in which Alfonso the Wise was educated, and in which he sometimes wrote, was now known as a polite language only in Portugal, where it had risen to be so independent of the stock from which it sprang as almost to disavow its origin. The Valencian and Catalonian, those kindred dialects of the Provençal race, whose influences in the thirteenth century were felt through the whole Peninsula, claimed, at this period, something of their earlier dignity only below the last range of hills on the coast of the Mediterranean. The Biscayan alone, unchanged as the mountains which sheltered it, still preserved for itself the same separate character it had at the earliest dawnings of tradition,—a character which has continued essentially the same down to our own times.
But though the Castilian, advancing with the whole authority of the government, which at this time spoke to the people of all Spain in no other language, was heard and acknowledged throughout the country as the language of the state and of all political power, still the popular and local habits of four centuries could not be at once or entirely broken up. The Galician, the Valencian, and the Catalonian continued to be spoken in the age of Charles the Fifth, and are spoken now by the masses of the people in their respective provinces, and to some extent in the refined society of each. Even Andalusia and Aragon have not yet emancipated themselves completely from their original idioms; and in the same way, each of the other grand divisions of the country, several of which were at one time independent kingdoms, are still, like Estremadura and La Mancha, distinguished by peculiarities of phraseology and accent.[881]
Castile alone, and especially Old Castile, claims, as of inherited right, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, the prerogative of speaking absolutely pure Spanish. Villalobos, it is true, who was always a flatterer of royal authority, insisted that this prerogative followed the residences of the sovereign and the court;[882] but the better opinion has been, that the purest form of the Castilian must be sought at Toledo,—the Imperial Toledo, as it was called,—peculiarly favored when it was the political capital of the ancient monarchy in the time of the Goths, and consecrated anew as the ecclesiastical head of all Christian Spain, the moment it was rescued from the hands of the Moors.[883] It has even been said, that the supremacy of this venerable city in the purity of its dialect was so fully settled, from the first appearance of the language as the language of the state in the thirteenth century, that Alfonso the Wise, in a Cortes held there, directed the meaning of any disputed word to be settled by its use at Toledo.[884] But however this may be, there is no question, that, from the time of Charles the Fifth to the present day, the Toledan has been considered, on the whole, the normal form of the national language, and that, from the same period, the Castilian dialect, having vindicated for itself an absolute supremacy over all the other dialects of the monarchy, has been the only one recognized as the language of the classical poetry and prose of the whole country.