CHAPTER XIX.
Marquis of Santillana. — His Life. — His Tendency to imitate the Italian and the Provençal. — His Courtly Style. — His Works. — His Character. — Juan de Mena. — His Life. — His Shorter Poems. — His Labyrinth, and its Merits.
Next after the king and Villena in rank, and much before them in merit, stands, at the head of the courtiers and poets of the reign of John the Second, Iñigo Lopez de Mendoza, Marquis of Santillana; one of the most distinguished members of that great family which has sometimes claimed the Cid for its founder,[604] and which certainly, with a long succession of honors, reaches down to our own times.[605] He was born in 1398, but was left an orphan in early youth; so that, though his father, the Grand Admiral of Castile, had, at the time of his death, larger possessions than any other nobleman in the kingdom, the son, when he was old enough to know their value, found them chiefly wrested from him by the bold barons who in the most lawless manner then divided among themselves the power and resources of the crown.
But the young Mendoza was not of a temper to submit patiently to such wrongs. At the age of sixteen he already figures in the chronicles of the time, as one of the dignitaries of state who honored the coronation of Ferdinand of Aragon;[606] and at the age of eighteen, we are told, he boldly reclaimed his possessions, which, partly through the forms of law and partly by force of arms, he recovered.[607] From this period we find him, during the reign of John the Second, busy in the affairs of the kingdom, both civil and military; always a personage of great consideration, and apparently one who, in difficult circumstances and wild times, acted from manly motives. When only thirty years old, he was distinguished at court as one of the persons concerned in arranging the marriage of the Infanta of Aragon;[608] and, soon afterwards, had a separate command against the Navarrese, in which, though he suffered a defeat from greatly superior numbers, he acquired lasting honor by his personal bravery and firmness.[609] Against the Moors he commanded long, and was often successful; and after the battle of Olmedo, in 1445, he was raised to the very high rank of Marquis; none in Castile having preceded him in that title except the family of Villena, already extinct.[610]
He was early, but not violently, opposed to the great favorite, the Constable Alvaro de Luna. In 1432, some of his friends and kinsmen, the good Count Haro and the Bishop of Palencia, with their adherents, having been seized by order of the Constable, Mendoza shut himself up in his strongholds till he was fully assured of his own safety.[611] From this time, therefore, the relations between two such personages could not be considered friendly; but still appearances were kept up, and the next year, at a grand jousting before the king in Madrid, where Mendoza offered himself against all comers, the Constable was one of his opponents; and after the encounter, they feasted together merrily and in all honor.[612] Indeed, the troubles between them were inconsiderable till 1448 and 1449, when the hard proceedings of the Constable against others of the friends and relations of Mendoza led him into a more formal opposition,[613] which in 1452 brought on a regular conspiracy between himself and two more of the leading nobles of the kingdom. The next year the favorite was sacrificed.[614] In the last scenes, however, of this extraordinary tragedy, the Marquis of Santillana seems to have had little share.
The king, disheartened by the loss of the minister on whose commanding genius he had so long relied, died in 1454. But Henry the Fourth, who followed on the throne of Castile, seemed even more willing to favor the great family of the Mendozas than his father had been. The Marquis, however, was little disposed to take advantage of his position. His wife died in 1455, and the pilgrimage he made on that occasion to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the religious poetry he wrote the same year, show the direction his thoughts had now taken. In this state of mind he seems to have continued; and though he once afterwards joined effectively with others to urge upon the king’s notice the disordered and ruinous state of the kingdom, yet, from the fall of the Constable to the time of his own death, which happened in 1458, the Marquis was chiefly busied with letters, and with such other occupations and thoughts as were consistent with a retired life.[615]
It is remarkable, that one, who, from his birth and position, was so much involved in the affairs of state at a period of great confusion and violence, should yet have cultivated elegant literature with earnestness. But the Marquis of Santillana, as he wrote to a friend and repeated to Prince Henry, believed that knowledge neither blunts the point of the lance, nor weakens the arm that wields a knightly sword.[616] He therefore gave himself freely to poetry and other graceful accomplishments; encouraged, perhaps, by the thought, that he was thus on the road to please the wayward monarch he served, if not the stern favorite who governed them all. One who was bred at the court, of which the Marquis was so distinguished an ornament, says, “He had great store of books, and gave himself to study, especially the study of moral philosophy and of things foreign and old. And he had always in his house doctors and masters, with whom he discoursed concerning the knowledge and the books he studied. Likewise, he himself made other books in verse and in prose, profitable to provoke to virtue and to restrain from vice. And in such wise did he pass the greater part of his leisure. Much fame and renown, also, he had in many kingdoms out of Spain; but he thought it a greater matter to have esteem among the wise than name and fame with the many.”[617]
The works of the Marquis of Santillana show, with sufficient distinctness, the relations in which he stood to his times and the direction he was disposed to take. From his social position, he could easily gratify any reasonable literary curiosity or taste he might possess; for the resources of the kingdom were open to him, and he could, therefore, not only obtain for his private study the poetry then abroad in the world, but often command to his presence the poets themselves. He was born in the Asturias, where his great family fiefs lay, and was educated in Castile; so that, on this side, he belonged to the genuinely indigenous school of Spanish poetry. But then he was also intimate with the Marquis of Villena, the head of the poetical Consistory of Barcelona, who, to encourage his poetical studies, addressed to him, in 1433, his curious letter on the art of the Troubadours, which Villena thus proposed to introduce into Castile.[618] And, after all, he lived chiefly at the court of John the Second, and was the friend and patron of the poets there, through whom and through his love of foreign letters it was natural he should come in contact with the great Italian masters, now exercising a wide sway within their own peninsula. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find that his own works belong more or less to each of these schools, and define his position as that of one who stands connected with the Provençal literature in Spain, which we have just examined; with the Italian, whose influences were now beginning to appear; and with the genuinely Spanish, which, though it often bears traces of each of the others, prevails at last over both of them.
Of his familiarity with the Provençal poetry abundant proof may be found in the Preface to his Proverbs, which he wrote when young, and in his letter to the Constable of Portugal, which belongs to the latter period of his life. In both, he treats the rules of that poetry as well founded, explaining them much as his friend and kinsman, the Marquis of Villena, did; and of some of the principal of its votaries in Spain, such as Bergédan, and Pedro and Ausias March, he speaks with great respect.[619] To Jordi, his contemporary, he elsewhere devotes an allegorical poem of some length and merit, intended to do him the highest honor as a Troubadour.[620]
But besides this, he directly imitated the Provençal poets. By far the most beautiful of his works, and one which may well be compared with the most graceful of the smaller poems in the Spanish language, is entirely in the Provençal manner. It is called “Una Serranilla,” or A Little Mountain Song, and was composed on a little girl, whom, when following his military duty, he found tending her father’s herds on the hills. Many such short songs occur in the later Provençal poets, under the name of “Pastoretas,” and “Vaqueiras,” one of which, by Giraud Riquier,—the same person who wrote verses on the death of Alfonso the Wise,—might have served as the very prototype of the present one; so strong is the resemblance between them. But none of them, either in the Provençal or in the Spanish, has ever equalled this “Serranilla” of the soldier; which, besides its inherent simplicity and liquid sweetness, has such grace and lightness in its movement, that it bears no marks of an unbecoming imitation, but, on the contrary, is rather to be regarded as a model of the natural old Castilian song, never to be transferred to another language, and hardly to be imitated with success in its own.[621]
The traces of Italian culture in the poetry of the Marquis of Santillana are no less obvious and important. Besides praising Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,[622] he imitates the opening of the “Inferno” in a long poem, in octave stanzas, on the death of the Marquis of Villena;[623] while, in the “Coronation of Jordi,” he shows that he was sensible to the power of more than one passage in the “Purgatorio.”[624] Moreover, he has the merit—if it be one—of introducing the peculiarly Italian form of the Sonnet into Spain; and with the different specimens of it that still remain among his works begins the ample series which, since the time of Boscan, has won for itself so large a space in Spanish literature. Seventeen sonnets of the Marquis of Santillana have been published, which he himself declares to be written in “the Italian fashion,” and appeals to Cavalcante, Guido d’Ascoli, Dante, and especially Petrarch, as his predecessors and models; an appeal hardly necessary to one who has read them, so plain is his desire to imitate the greatest of his masters. The sonnets of the Marquis of Santillana, however, have little merit, except in their careful versification, and were soon forgotten.[625]
But his principal works were more in the manner then prevalent at the Spanish court. Most of them are in verse, and, like a short poem to the queen, several riddles, and a few religious compositions, are generally full of conceits and affectation, and have little value of any sort.[626] Two or three, however, are of consequence. One called “The Complaint of Love,” and referring apparently to the story of Macias, is written with fluency and sweetness, and is curious as containing lines in Galician, which, with other similar verses and his letter to the Constable of Portugal, show he extended his thoughts to this ancient dialect, where are found some of the earliest intimations of Spanish literature.[627] Another of his poems, which has been called “The Ages of the World,” is a compendium of universal history, beginning at the creation and coming down to the time of John the Second, with a gross compliment to whom it ends. It was written in 1426, and fills three hundred and thirty-two stanzas of double redondillas, dull and prosaic throughout.[628] The third is a moral poem, thrown into the shape of a dialogue between Bias and Fortune, setting forth the Stoical doctrine of the worthlessness of all outward good. It consists of a hundred and eighty octave stanzas in the short Spanish measure, and was written for the consolation of a cousin and much loved friend of the Toledo family, whose imprisonment in 1448, by order of the Constable, caused great troubles in the kingdom, and contributed to the final alienation of the Marquis from the favorite.[629] The fourth is on the kindred subject of the fall and death of the Constable himself, in 1453; a poem in fifty-three octave stanzas, each of two redondillas, containing a confession supposed to have been made by the victim on the scaffold, partly to the multitude and partly to his priest.[630] In both of the last two poems, and especially in the dialogue between Bias and Fortune, passages of merit are found, which are not only fluent, but strong; not only terse and pointed, but graceful.[631]
But the most important of the poetical works of the Marquis of Santillana is one approaching the form of a drama, and called the “Comedieta de Ponza,” or The Little Comedy of Ponza. It is founded on the story of a great sea-fight near the island of Ponza in 1435, where the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the Infante Don Henry of Castile, with many noblemen and knights, were taken prisoners by the Genoese,—a disaster to Spain, which fills a large space in the old national chronicles.[632] The poem of Santillana, written immediately after the occurrence of the calamity it commemorates, is called a Comedy, because its conclusion is happy, and Dante is cited as authority for this use of the word.[633] But in fact it is a dream or vision; and one of the early passages in the “Inferno,” imitated at the very opening, leaves no doubt as to what was in the author’s mind when he wrote it.[634] The queens of Navarre and Aragon, and the Infante Doña Catalina, as the persons most interested in the unhappy battle, are the chief speakers. But Boccaccio is also a principal personage, though seemingly for no better reason than that he wrote the treatise on the Disasters of Princes; and after being addressed very solemnly in this capacity by the three royal ladies and by the Marquis of Santillana himself, he answers no less solemnly in his native Italian. Queen Leonora then gives him an account of the glories and grandeur of her house, accompanied with auguries of misfortune, which are hardly uttered before a letter comes announcing their fulfilment in the calamities of the battle of Ponza. The queen mother, after hearing the contents of this letter quite through, falls as one dead. Fortune, in a female form, richly attired, enters, and consoles them all; first showing a magnificent perspective of past times, with promises of still greater glory to their descendants, and then fairly presenting to them in person the very princes whose captivity had just filled them with such fear and grief. And this ends the Comedieta.
It fills a hundred and twenty of the old Italian octave stanzas,—such stanzas as are used in the “Filostrato” of Boccaccio,—and much of it is written in easy verse. There is a great deal of ancient learning introduced into it awkwardly and in bad taste; but there is one passage in which a description of Fortune is skilfully borrowed from the seventh canto of the “Inferno,” and another in which is a pleasing paraphrase of the Beatus ille of Horace.[635] The machinery and management of the story, it is obvious, could hardly be worse; and yet when it was written, and perhaps still more when it was declaimed, as it probably was before some of the sufferers in the disaster it records, it may well have been felt as an effective exhibition of a very grave passage in the history of the time. On this account, too, it is still interesting.
The Comedieta, however, was not the most popular, if it was the most important, of the works of Santillana. That distinction belongs to a collection of Proverbs, which he made at the request of John the Second, for the education of his son Henry, afterwards Henry the Fourth. It consists of a hundred rhymed sentences, each generally containing one proverb, and so sometimes passes under the name of the “Centiloquio.” The proverbs themselves are, no doubt, mostly taken from that unwritten wisdom of the common people, for which, in this form, Spain has always been more famous than any other country; but, in the general tone he has adopted, and in many of his separate instructions, the Marquis is rather indebted to King Solomon and the New Testament. Such as they are, however, they had—perhaps from their connection with the service of the heir-apparent—a remarkable success, to which many old manuscripts, still extant, bear witness. They were printed, too, as early as 1496; and in the course of the next century nine or ten editions of them may be reckoned, generally encumbered with a learned commentary by Doctor Pedro Diaz of Toledo. They have, however, no poetical value, and interest us only from the circumstances attending their composition, and from the fact that they form the oldest collection of proverbs made in modern times.[636]
In the latter part of his life, the fame of the Marquis of Santillana was spread very widely. Juan de Mena says, that men came from foreign countries merely to see him;[637] and the young Constable of Portugal—the same prince who afterwards entered into the Catalonian troubles, and claimed to be king of Aragon—formally asked him for his poems, which the Marquis sent with a letter on the poetic art, by way of introduction, written about 1455, and containing notices of such Spanish poets as were his predecessors or contemporaries; a letter which is, in fact, the most important single document we now possess touching the early literature of Spain. It is one, too, which contrasts favorably with the curious epistle he himself received on a similar subject, twenty years before, from the Marquis of Villena, and shows how much he was in advance of his age in the spirit of criticism and in a well-considered love of letters.[638]
Indeed, in all respects we can see that he was a remarkable man; one thoroughly connected with his age and strong in its spirit. His conduct in affairs, from his youth upwards, shows this. So does the tone of his Proverbs, that of his letter to his imprisoned cousin, and that of his poem on the death of Alvaro de Luna. He was a poet also, though not of a high order; a man of much reading, when reading was rare;[639] and a critic, who showed judgment, when judgment and the art of criticism hardly went together. And, finally, he was the founder of an Italian and courtly school in Spanish poetry; one, on the whole, adverse to the national spirit, and finally overcome by it, and yet one that long exercised a considerable sway, and at last contributed something to the materials which, in the sixteenth century, went to build up and constitute the proper literature of the country.
There lived, however, during the reign of John the Second, and in the midst of his court, another poet, whose general influence at the time was less felt than that of his patron, the Marquis of Santillana, but who has since been oftener mentioned and remembered,—Juan de Mena, sometimes, but inappropriately, called the Ennius of Spanish poetry. He was born in Córdova, about the year 1411, the child of parents respected, but not noble.[640] He was early left an orphan, and from the age of three-and-twenty, of his own free choice, devoted himself wholly to letters; going through a regular course of studies, first at Salamanca, and afterwards at Rome. On his return home, he became a Veinte-quatro of Córdova, or one of the twenty-four persons who constituted the government of the city; but we early find him at court on a footing of familiarity as a poet, and we know he was soon afterwards Latin secretary to John the Second, and historiographer of Castile.[641] This brought him into relations with the king and the Constable; relations important in themselves, and of which we have by accident a few singular intimations. The king, if we can trust the witness, was desirous to be well regarded in history; and, to make sure of it, directed his confidential physician to instruct his historiographer, from time to time, how he ought to treat different parts of his subject. In one letter, for instance, he is told with much gravity, “The king is very desirous of praise”; and then follows a statement of facts, as they ought to be represented, in a somewhat delicate case of the neglect of the Count de Castro to obey the royal commands.[642] In another letter he is told, “The king expects much glory from you”; a remark which is followed by another narrative of facts as they should be set forth.[643] But though Juan de Mena was employed on this important work as late as 1445, and apparently was favored in it, both by the king and the Constable, still there is no reason to suppose that any part of what he did is preserved in the Chronicle of John the Second exactly as it came from his hands.
The chronicler, however, who seems to have been happy in possessing a temperament proper for courtly success, has left proofs enough of the means by which he reached it. He was a sort of poet-laureate without the title, writing verses on the battle of Olmedo in 1445, on the pacification between the king and his son in 1446, on the affair of Peñafiel in 1449, and on the slight wound the Constable received at Palencia in 1452; in all which, as well as in other and larger poems, he shows a great devotion to the reigning powers of the state.[644]
He stood well, too, in Portugal. The Infante Don Pedro—a verse-writer of some name, who travelled much in different parts of the world—became personally acquainted with Juan de Mena in Spain, and, on his return to Lisbon, addressed a few verses to him, better than the answer they called forth; besides which, he imitated, with no mean skill, Mena’s “Labyrinth,” in a Spanish poem of a hundred and twenty-five stanzas.[645] With such connections and habits, with a wit that made him agreeable in personal intercourse,[646] and with an even good-humor which rendered him welcome to the opposite parties in the kingdom,[647] he seems to have led a contented life; and at his death, which happened suddenly in 1456, in consequence of a fall from his mule, the Marquis of Santillana, always his friend and patron, wrote his epitaph, and erected a monument to his memory in Torrelaguna, both of which are still to be seen.[648]
The works of Juan de Mena evidently enjoyed the sunshine of courtly favor from their first appearance. While still young, if we can trust the simple-hearted letters that pass under the name of the royal physician, they were already the subject of gossip at the palace;[649] and the collections of poetry made by Baena and Estuñiga, for the amusement of the king and the court, about 1450, contain abundant proofs that his favor was not worn out by time; for as many of his verses as could be found seem to have been put into each of them. But though this circumstance, and that of their appearance before the end of the century in two or three of the very earliest printed collections of poetry, leave no doubt that they enjoyed, from the first, a sort of fashionable success, still it can hardly be said they were at any time really popular. Two or three of his shorter effusions, indeed, like the verses addressed to his lady to show her how formidable she is in every way, and those on a vicious mule he had bought from a friar, have a spirit that would make them amusing anywhere.[650] But most of his minor poems, of which about twenty may be found scattered in rare books,[651] belong only to the fashionable style of the society in which he lived, and, from their affectation, conceits, and obscure allusions, can have had little value, even when they were first circulated, except to the persons to whom they were addressed, or the narrow circle in which those persons moved.
His poem on the Seven Deadly Sins, in nearly eight hundred short verses, divided into double redondillas, is a work of graver pretensions. But it is a dull allegory, full of pedantry and metaphysical fancies on the subject of a war between Reason and the Will of Man. Notwithstanding its length, however, it was left unfinished; and a certain friar, named Gerónimo de Olivares, added four hundred more verses to it, in order to bring the discussion to what he conceived a suitable conclusion. Both parts, however, are as tedious as the theology of the age could make them.
His “Coronation” is better, and fills about five hundred lines, arranged in double quintillas. Its name comes from its subject, which is an imaginary journey of Juan de Mena to Mount Parnassus, in order to witness the coronation of the Marquis of Santillana, both as a poet and a hero, by the Muses and the Virtues. It is, therefore, strictly a poem in honor of his great patron; and being such, it is somewhat singular that it should be written in a light and almost satirical vein. At the opening, as well as in other parts, it has the appearance of a parody on the “Divina Commedia”; for it begins with the wanderings of the author in an obscure wood, after which he passes through regions of misery, where he beholds the punishments of the dead; visits the abodes of the blessed, where he sees the great of former ages; and, at last, comes to Mount Parnassus, where he is present at a sort of apotheosis of the yet living object of his reverence and admiration. The versification of the poem is easy, and some passages in it are amusing; but, in general, it is rendered dull by unprofitable learning. The best portions are those merely descriptive.
But whether Juan de Mena, in his “Coronation,” intended deliberately to be the parodist of Dante or not, it is quite plain that in his principal work, called “The Labyrinth,” he became Dante’s serious imitator. This long poem—which he seems to have begun very early, and which, though he occupied himself much with its composition, he left unfinished at the time of his sudden death—consists of about twenty-five hundred lines, divided into stanzas; each stanza being composed of two redondillas in those long lines which were then called “versos de arte mayor,” or verses of higher art, because they were supposed to demand a greater degree of skill than the shorter verses used in the old national measures. The poem itself is sometimes called “The Labyrinth,” probably from the intricacy of its plan, and sometimes “The Three Hundred,” because that was originally the number of its coplas or stanzas. Its purpose is nothing less than to teach, by vision and allegory, whatever relates to the duties or the destiny of man; and the rules by which its author was governed in its composition are evidently gathered from the example of Dante in his “Divina Commedia,” and from Dante’s precepts in his treatise “De Vulgari Eloquentia.”
After the dedication of the Labyrinth to John the Second, and some other preparatory and formal parts, the poem opens with the author’s wanderings in a wood, like Dante, exposed to beasts of prey. While there, he is met by Providence, who comes to him in the form of a beautiful woman, and offers to lead him, by a sure path, through the dangers that beset him, and to explain, “as far as they are palpable to human understanding,” the dark mysteries of life that oppress his spirit. This promise she fulfils by carrying him to what she calls the spherical centre of the five zones; or, in other words, to a point where the poet is supposed to see at once all the countries and nations of the earth. There she shows him three vast mystical wheels,—the wheels of Destiny,—two representing the past and the future, in constant rest, and the third representing the present, in constant motion. Each contains its appropriate portion of the human race, and through each are extended the seven circles of the seven planetary influences that govern the fates of mortal men; the characters of the most distinguished of whom are explained to the poet by his divine guide, as their shadows rise before him in these mysterious circles.
From this point, therefore, the poem becomes a confused gallery of mythological and historical portraits, arranged, as in the “Paradiso” of Dante, according to the order of the seven planets.[652] They have generally little merit, and are often shadowed forth very indistinctly. The best sketches are those of personages who lived in the poet’s own time or country; some drawn with courtly flattery, like the king’s and the Constable’s; others with more truth, as well as more skill, like those of the Marquis of Villena, Juan de Merlo, and the young Dávalos, whose premature fate is recorded in a few lines of unwonted power and tenderness.[653]
The story told most in detail is that of the Count de Niebla, who, in 1436, at the siege of Gibraltar, sacrificed his own life in a noble attempt to save that of one of his dependants; the boat in which the Count might have been rescued being too small to save the whole of the party, who thus all perished together in a flood-tide. This disastrous event, and especially the self-devotion of Niebla, who was one of the principal nobles of the kingdom, and at that moment employed on a daring expedition against the Moors, are recorded in the chronicles of the age, and introduced by Juan de Mena in the following characteristic stanzas:[654]—
And he who seems to sit upon that bark,
Invested by the cruel waves, that wait
And welter round him to prepare his fate,—
His and his bold companions’, in their dark
And watery abyss;—that stately form
Is Count Niebla’s, he whose honored name,
More brave than fortunate, has given to fame
The very tide that drank his life-blood warm.
And they that eagerly around him press,
Though men of noble mark and bold emprise,
Grow pale and dim as his full glories rise,
Showing their own peculiar honors less.
Thus Carrion or Arlanza, sole and free,
Bears, like Pisuerga, each its several name,
And triumphs in its undivided fame,
As a fair, graceful stream. But when the three
Are joined in one, each yields its separate right,
And their accumulated headlong course
We call Duero. Thus might these enforce
Each his own claim to stand the noblest knight,
If brave Niebla came not with his blaze
Of glory to eclipse their humbler praise.
Too much honor is not to be claimed for such poetry; but there is little in Juan de Mena’s works equal to this specimen, which has at least the merit of being free from the pedantry and conceits that disfigure most of his writings.
Such as it was, however, the Labyrinth received great admiration from the court of John the Second, and, above all, from the king himself, whose physician, we are told, wrote to the poet: “Your polished and erudite work, called ‘The Second Order of Mercury,’ hath much pleased his Majesty, who carries it with him when he journeys about or goes a-hunting.”[655] And again: “The end of the ‘third circle’ pleased the king much. I read it to his Majesty, who keeps it on his table with his prayer-book, and takes it up often.”[656] Indeed, the whole poem was, it seems, submitted to the king, piece by piece, as it was composed; and we are told, that, in one instance, at least, it received a royal correction, which still stands unaltered.[657] His Majesty even advised that it should be extended from three hundred stanzas to three hundred and sixty-five, though for no better reason than to make their number correspond exactly with that of the days in the year; and the twenty-four stanzas commonly printed at the end of it are supposed to have been an attempt to fulfil the monarch’s command. But whether this be so or not, nobody now wishes the poem to be longer than it is.[658]