CHAPTER XVII.
Endeavours to revive the Provençal Spirit. — Floral Games at Toulouse. — Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia at Barcelona. — Catalan and Valencian Poetry. — Ausias March. — Jaume Roig. — Decline of this Poetry. — Influence of Castile. — Poetical Contest at Valencia. — Valencian Poets who wrote in Castilian. — Prevalence of the Castilian.
The failure of the Provençal language, and especially the failure of the Provençal culture, were not looked upon with indifference in the countries on either side of the Pyrenees, where they had so long prevailed. On the contrary, efforts were made to restore both, first in France, and afterwards in Spain. At Toulouse, on the Garonne, not far from the foot of the mountains, the magistrates of the city determined, in 1323, to form a company or guild for this purpose; and, after some deliberation, constituted it under the name of the “Sobregaya Companhia dels Sept Trobadors de Tolosa,” or the Very Gay Company of the Seven Troubadours of Toulouse. This company immediately sent forth a letter, partly in prose and partly in verse, summoning all poets to come to Toulouse on the first day of May in 1324, and there “with joy of heart contend for the prize of a golden violet,” which should be adjudged to him who should offer the best poem, suited to the occasion. The concourse was great, and the first prize was given to a poem in honor of the Madonna by Ramon Vidal de Besalú, a Catalan gentleman, who seems to have been the author of the regulations for the festival, and to have been declared a doctor of the Gay Saber on the occasion. In 1355, this company formed for itself a more ample body of laws, partly in prose and partly in verse, under the title of “Ordenanzas dels Sept Senhors Mantenedors del Gay Saber,” or Ordinances of the Seven Lords Conservators of the Gay Saber, which, with the needful modifications, have been observed down to our own times, and still regulate the festival annually celebrated at Toulouse, on the first day of May, under the name of the Floral Games.[534]
Toulouse was separated from Aragon only by the picturesque range of the Pyrenees; and similarity of language and old political connections prevented even the mountains from being a serious obstacle to intercourse. What was done at Toulouse, therefore, was soon known at Barcelona, where the court of Aragon generally resided, and where circumstances soon favored a formal introduction of the poetical institutions of the Troubadours. John the First, who, in 1387, succeeded Peter the Fourth, was a prince of more gentle manners than were common in his time, and more given to festivity and shows than was, perhaps, consistent with the good of his kingdom, and certainly more than was suited to the fierce and turbulent spirit of his nobility.[535] Among his other attributes was a love of poetry; and in 1388, he despatched a solemn embassy, as if for an affair of state, to Charles the Sixth of France, praying him to cause certain poets of the company at Toulouse to visit Barcelona, in order that they might found there an institution like their own, for the Gay Saber. In consequence of this mission, two of the seven conservators of the Floral Games came to Barcelona in 1390, and established what was called a “Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia,” with laws and usages not unlike those of the institution they represented. Martin, who followed John on the throne, increased the privileges of the new Consistory, and added to its resources; but at his death, in 1409, it was removed to Tortosa, and its meetings were suspended by troubles that prevailed through the country, in consequence of a disputed succession.
At length, when Ferdinand the Just was declared king, their meetings were resumed. Enrique de Villena—whom we must speedily notice as a nobleman of the first rank in the state, nearly allied to the blood royal, both of Castile and Aragon—came with the new king to Barcelona in 1412, and, being a lover of poetry, busied himself while there in reëstablishing and reforming the Consistory, of which he became, for some time, the principal head and manager. This was, no doubt, the period of its greatest glory. The king himself frequently attended its meetings. Many poems were read by their authors before the judges appointed to examine them, and prizes and other distinctions were awarded to the successful competitors.[536] From this time, therefore, poetry in the native dialects of the country was held in honor in the capitals of Catalonia and Aragon. Public poetical contests were, from time to time, celebrated, and many poets called forth under their influence during the reign of Alfonso the Fifth and that of John the Second, which, ending in 1479, was followed by the consolidation of the whole Spanish monarchy, and the predominance of the Castilian power and language.[537]
During the period, however, of which we have been speaking, and which embraces the century before the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catalan modification of Provençal poetry had its chief success, and produced all the authors that deserve notice. At its opening, Zurita, the faithful annalist of Aragon, speaking of the reign of John the First, says, that, “in place of arms and warlike exercises, which had formerly been the pastime of princes, now succeeded trobas and poetry in the mother tongue, with its art, called the ‘Gaya Sciencia,’ whereof schools began to be instituted”;—schools which, as he intimates, were so thronged, that the dignity of the art they taught was impaired by the very numbers devoted to it.[538] Who these poets were the grave historian does not stop to inform us, but we learn something of them from another and better source; for, according to the fashion of the time, a collection of poetry was made a little after the middle of the fifteenth century, which includes the whole period, and contains the names, and more or less of the works, of those who were then best known and most considered. It begins with a grant of assistance to the Consistory of Barcelona, by Ferdinand the Just, in 1413; and then, going back as far as to the time of Jacme March, who, as we have seen, flourished in 1371, presents a series of more than three hundred poems, by about thirty authors, down to the time of Ausias March, who certainly lived in 1460, and whose works are, as they well deserve to be, prominent in the collection.
Among the poets here brought together are Luis de Vilarasa, who lived in 1416;[539] Berenguer de Masdovelles, who seems to have flourished soon after 1453;[540] Jordi, about whom there has been much discussion, but whom reasonable critics must place as late as 1450-1460;[541] and Antonio Vallmanya, some of whose poems are dated in 1457 and 1458.[542] Besides these, Juan Rocaberti, Fogaçot, and Guerau, with others apparently of the same period, are contributors to the collection, so that its whole air is that of the Catalan and Valencian imitations of the Provençal Troubadours in the fifteenth century.[543] If, therefore, to this curious Cancionero we add the translation of the “Divina Commedia” made into Catalan by Andres Febrer in 1428,[544] and the romance of “Tirante the White,” translated into Valencian by its author, Joannot Martorell,—which Cervantes calls “a treasure of contentment and a mine of pleasure,”[545]—we shall have all that is needful of the peculiar literature of the northeastern part of Spain during the greater part of the century in which it flourished. Two authors, however, who most illustrated it, deserve more particular notice.
The first of them is Ausias or Augustin March. His family, originally Catalan, went to Valencia at the time of the conquest, in 1238, and was distinguished, in successive generations, for the love of letters. He himself was of noble rank, possessed the seigniory of the town of Beniarjó and its neighbouring villages, and served in the Cortes of Valencia in 1446. But, beyond these few facts, we know little of his life, except that he was an intimate personal friend of the accomplished and unhappy Prince Carlos of Viana, and that he died, probably, in 1460,—certainly before 1462,—well deserving the record made by his contemporary, the Grand Constable of Castile, that “he was a great Troubadour and a man of a very lofty spirit.”[546]
So much of his poetry as has been preserved is dedicated to the honor of a lady, whom he loved and served in life and in death, and whom, if we are literally to believe his account, he first saw on a Good Friday in church, exactly as Petrarch first saw Laura. But this is probably only an imitation of the great Italian master, whose fame then overshadowed whatever there was of literature in the world. At any rate, the poems of March leave no doubt that he was a follower of Petrarch. They are in form what he calls cants; each of which generally consists of from five to ten stanzas. The whole collection, amounting to one hundred and sixteen of these short poems, is divided into four parts, and comprises ninety-three cants or canzones of Love, in which he complains much of the falsehood of his mistress, fourteen moral and didactic canzones, a single spiritual one, and eight on Death. But though March, in the framework of his poetry, is an imitator of Petrarch, his manner is his own. It is grave, simple, and direct, with few conceits, and much real feeling; besides which, he has a truth and freshness in his expressions, resulting partly from the dialect he uses, and partly from the tenderness of his own nature, which are very attractive. No doubt, he is the most successful of all the Valencian and Catalan poets whose works have come down to us; but what distinguishes him from all of them, and indeed from the Provençal school generally, is the sensibility and moral feeling that pervade so much of what he wrote. By these qualities his reputation and honors have been preserved in his own country down to the present time. His works passed through four editions in the sixteenth century, and enjoyed the honor of being read to Philip the Second, when a youth, by his tutor; they were translated into Latin and Italian, and in the proud Castilian were versified by a poet of no less consequence than Montemayor.[547]
The other poet who should be mentioned in the same relations was a contemporary of March, and, like him, a native of Valencia. His name is Jaume or James Roig, and he was physician to Mary, queen of Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon. If his own authority is not to be accounted rather poetical than historical, he was a man of much distinction in his time, and respected in other countries as well as at home. But if that be set aside, we know little of him, except that he was one of the persons who contended for a poetical prize at Valencia in 1474, and that he died there of apoplexy on the 4th of April, 1478.[548] His works are not much better known than his life, though, in some respects, they are well worthy of notice. Hardly any thing, indeed, remains to us of them, except the principal one, a poem of three hundred pages, sometimes called the “Book of Advice,” and sometimes the “Book of the Ladies.”[549] It is chiefly a satire on women, but the conclusion is devoted to the praise and glory of the Madonna, and the whole is interspersed with sketches of himself and his times, and advice to his nephew, Balthazar Bou, for whose especial benefit the poem seems to have been written.
It is divided into four books, which are subdivided into parts, little connected with each other, and often little in harmony with the general subject of the whole. Some of it is full of learning and learned names, and some of it would seem to be devout, but its prevailing air is certainly not at all religious. It is written in short rhymed verses, consisting of from two to five syllables,—an irregular measure, which has been called cudolada, and one which, as here used, has been much praised for its sweetness by those who are familiar enough with the principles of its structure to make the necessary elisions and abbreviations; though to others it can hardly appear better than whimsical and spirited.[550] The following sketch of himself may be taken as a specimen of it; and shows that he had as little of the spirit of a poet as Skelton, with whom, in many respects, he may be compared. Roig represents himself to have been ill of a fever, when a boy, and to have hastened from his sick bed into the service of a Catalan freebooting gentleman, like Roque Guinart or Rocha Guinarda, an historical personage of the same Catalonia, and of nearly the same period, who figures in the Second Part of Don Quixote.
Bed I abjured,
Though hardly cured,
And then went straight
To seek my fate.
A Catalan,
A nobleman,
A highway knight,
Of ancient right,
Gave me, in grace,
A page’s place.
With him I lived,
And with him thrived,
Till I came out
Man grown and stout;
For he was wise,
Taught me to prize
My time, and learn
My bread to earn,
By service hard
At watch and ward,
To hunt the game,
Wild hawks to tame,
On horse to prance,
In hall to dance,
To carve, to play,
And make my way.[551]
The poem, its author tells us, was written in 1460, and we know that it continued popular long enough to pass through five editions before 1562. But portions of it are so indecent, that, when, in 1735, it was thought worth while to print it anew, its editor, in order to account for the large omissions he was obliged to make, resorted to the amusing expedient of pretending he could find no copy of the old editions which was not deficient in the passages he left out of his own.[552] Of course, Roig is not much read now. His indecency and the obscurity of his idiom alike cut him off from the polished portions of Spanish society; though out of his free and spirited satire much may be gleaned to illustrate the tone of manners and the modes of living and thinking in his time.
The death of Roig brings us to the period when the literature of the eastern part of Spain, along the shores of the Mediterranean, began to decline. Its decay was the natural, but melancholy, result of the character of the literature itself, and of the circumstances in which it was accidentally placed. It was originally Provençal in its spirit and elements, and had therefore been of quick, rather than of firm growth;—a gay vegetation, which sprang forth spontaneously with the first warmth of the spring, and which could hardly thrive in any other season than the gentle one that gave it birth. As it gradually advanced, carried by the removal of the seat of political power, from Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Saragossa, it was constantly approaching the literature that had first appeared in the mountains of the Northwest, whose more vigorous and grave character it was ill fitted to resist. When, therefore, the two came in contact, there was but a short struggle for the supremacy. The victory was almost immediately decided in favor of that which, springing from the elements of a strong and proud character, destined to vindicate for itself the political sway of the whole country, was armed with a power to which its more gay and gracious rival could offer no effective opposition.
The period, when these two literatures, advancing from opposite corners of the Peninsula, finally met, cannot, from its nature, be determined with much precision. But, like the progress of each, it was the result of political causes and tendencies which are obvious and easily traced. The family that ruled in Aragon had, from the time of James the Conqueror, been connected with that established in Castile and the North; and Ferdinand the Just, who was crowned in Saragossa in 1412, was a Castilian prince; so that, from this period, both thrones were absolutely filled by members of the same royal house; and Valencia and Burgos, as far as their courts touched and controlled the literature of either, were to a great degree under the same influences. And this control was neither slight nor inefficient. Poetry, in that age, everywhere sought shelter under courtly favor, and in Spain easily found it. John the Second was a professed and successful patron of letters; and when Ferdinand came to assume the crown of Aragon, he was accompanied by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman whose great fiefs lay on the borders of Valencia, but who, notwithstanding his interest in the Southern literature and in the Consistory of Barcelona, yet spoke the Castilian as his native language, and wrote in no other. We may, therefore, well believe, that, in the reigns of Ferdinand the Just and Alfonso the Fifth, between 1412 and 1458, the influence of the North began to make inroads on the poetry of the South, though it does not appear that either March or Roig, or any one of their immediate school, proved habitually unfaithful to his native dialect.
At length, forty years after the death of Villena, we find a decided proof that the Castilian was beginning to be known and cultivated on the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1474, a poetical contest was publicly held at Valencia, in honor of the Madonna;—a sort of literary jousting, like those so common afterwards in the time of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Forty poets contended for the prize. The Viceroy was present. It was a solemn and showy occasion; and all the poems offered were printed the same year by Bernardo Fenollar, Secretary of the meeting, in a volume which is valued as the first book known to have been printed in Spain.[553] Four of these poems are in Castilian. This leaves no doubt that Castilian verse was now deemed a suitable entertainment for a popular audience at Valencia. Fenollar, too, who wrote, besides what appears in this contest, a small volume of poetry on the Passion of our Saviour, has left us at least one cancion in Castilian, though his works were otherwise in his native dialect, and were composed apparently for the amusement of his friends in Valencia, where he was a person of consideration, and in whose University, founded in 1499, he was a professor.[554]
Probably Castilian poetry was rarely written in Valencia during the fifteenth century, while, on the other hand, Valencian was written constantly. “The Suit of the Olives,” for instance, wholly in that dialect, was composed by Jaume Gazull, Fenollar, and Juan Moreno, who seem to have been personal friends, and who united their poetical resources to produce this satire, in which, under the allegory of olive-trees, and in language not always so modest as good taste requires, they discuss together the dangers to which the young and the old are respectively exposed from the solicitations of worldly pleasure.[555] Another dialogue, by the same three poets, in the same dialect, soon followed, dated in 1497, which is supposed to have occurred in the bed-chamber of a lady just recovering from the birth of a child, in which is examined the question whether young men or old make the best husbands; an inquiry decided by Venus in favor of the young, and ended, most inappropriately, by a religious hymn.[556] Other poets were equally faithful to their vernacular; among whom were Juan Escriva, ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns to the Pope, in 1497, who was probably the last person of high rank that wrote in it;[557] and Vincent Ferrandis, concerned in a poetical contest in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena, at Valencia, in 1511, whose poems seem, on other occasions, to have carried off public honors, and to have been, from their sweetness and power, worthy of the distinction they won.[558]
Meantime, Valencian poets are not wanting who wrote more or less in Castilian. Francisco Castelví, a friend of Fenollar, is one of them.[559] Another is Narcis Viñoles, who flourished in 1500, who wrote in Tuscan as well as in Castilian and Valencian, and who evidently thought his native dialect somewhat barbarous.[560] A third is Juan Tallante, whose religious poems are found at the opening of the old General Cancionero.[561] A fourth is Luis Crespi, member of the ancient family of Valdaura, and in 1506 head of the University of Valencia.[562] And among the latest, if not the very last, was Fernandez de Heredia, who died in 1549, of whom we have hardly any thing in Valencian, but much in Castilian.[563] Indeed, that the Castilian, in the early part of the century, had obtained a real supremacy in whatever there was of poetry and elegant literature along the shores of the Mediterranean cannot be doubted; for, before the death of Heredia, Boscan had already deserted his native Catalonian, and begun to form a school in Spanish literature that has never since disappeared; and shortly afterwards, Timoneda and his followers showed, by their successful representation of Castilian farces in the public squares of Valencia, that the ancient dialect had ceased to be insisted upon in its own capital. The language of the court of Castile had, for such purposes, become the prevailing language of all the South.
This, in fact, was the circumstance that determined the fate of all that remained in Spain on the foundations of the Provençal refinement. The crowns of Aragon and Castile had been united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella; the court had been removed from Saragossa, though that city still claimed the dignity of being regarded as an independent capital; and with the tide of empire, that of cultivation gradually flowed down from the West and the North. Some of the poets of the South have, it is true, in later times, ventured to write in their native dialects. The most remarkable of them is Vicent Garcia, who was a friend of Lope de Vega, and died in 1623.[564] But his poetry, in all its various phases, is a mixture of several dialects, and shows, notwithstanding its provincial air, the influence of the court of Philip the Fourth, where its author for a time lived; while the poetry printed later, or heard in our own days on the popular theatres of Barcelona and Valencia, is in a dialect so grossly corrupted, that it is no longer easy to acknowledge it as that of the descendants of Muntaner and March.[565]
The degradation of the two more refined dialects in the southern and eastern parts of Spain, which was begun in the time of the Catholic sovereigns, may be considered as completed when the seat of the national government was settled, first in Old and afterwards in New Castile; since, by this circumstance, the prevalent authority of the Castilian was finally recognized and insured. The change was certainly neither unreasonable nor ill-timed. The language of the North was already more ample, more vigorous, and more rich in idiomatic constructions; indeed, in almost every respect, better fitted to become national than that of the South. And yet we can hardly follow and witness the results of such a revolution but with feelings of a natural regret; for the slow decay and final disappearance of any language bring with them melancholy thoughts, which are, in some sort, peculiar to the occasion. We feel as if a portion of the world’s intelligence were extinguished; as if we were ourselves cut off from a part of the intellectual inheritance, to which we had in many respects an equal right with those who destroyed it, and which they were bound to pass down to us unimpaired as they themselves had received it. The same feeling pursues us even when, as in the case of the Greek or Latin, the people that spoke it had risen to the full height of their refinement, and left behind them monuments by which all future times can measure and share their glory. But our regret is deeper when the language of a people is cut off in its youth, before its character is fully developed; when its poetical attributes are just beginning to appear, and when all is bright with promise and hope.[566]
This was singularly the misfortune and the fate of the Provençal and of the two principal dialects into which it was modified and moulded. For the Provençal started forth in the darkest period Europe had seen since Grecian civilization had first dawned on the world. It kindled, at once, all the South of France with its brightness, and spread its influence, not only into the neighbouring countries, but even to the courts of the cold and unfriendly North. It flourished long, with a tropical rapidity and luxuriance, and gave token, from the first, of a light-hearted spirit, that promised, in the fulness of its strength, to produce a poetry, different, no doubt, from that of antiquity, with which it had no real connection, but yet a poetry as fresh as the soil from which it sprang, and as genial as the climate by which it was quickened. But the cruel and shameful war of the Albigenses drove the Troubadours over the Pyrenees, and the revolutions of political power and the prevalence of the spirit of the North crushed them on the Spanish shores of the Mediterranean. We follow, therefore, with a natural and inevitable regret, their long and wearisome retreat, marked as it is everywhere with the wrecks and fragments of their peculiar poetry and cultivation, from Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Saragossa and Valencia, where, oppressed by the prouder and more powerful Castilian, what remained of the language that gave the first impulse to poetical feeling in modern times sinks into a neglected dialect, and, without having attained the refinement that would preserve its name and its glory to future times, becomes as much a dead language as the Greek or the Latin.[567]