CHAPTER XX.
Progress of the Castilian Language. — Poets of the Time of John the Second. — Villasandino. — Francisco Imperial. — Baena. — Rodriguez del Padron. — Prose-writers. — Cibdareal and Fernan Perez de Guzman.
In one point of view, all the works of Juan de Mena are of consequence. They mark the progress of the Castilian language, which, in his hands, advanced more than it had for a long period before. From the time of Alfonso the Wise, nearly two centuries had elapsed, in which, though this fortunate dialect had almost completely asserted its supremacy over its rivals, and by the force of political circumstances had been spread through a large part of Spain, still, little had been done to enrich and nothing to raise or purify it. The grave and stately tone of the “Partidas” and the “General Chronicle” had not again been reached; the lighter air of the “Conde Lucanor” had not been attempted. Indeed, such wild and troubled times, as those of Peter the Cruel and the three monarchs who had followed him on the throne, permitted men to think of little except their personal safety and their immediate well-being.
But now, in the time of John the Second, though the affairs of the country were hardly more composed, they had taken the character rather of feuds between the great nobles than of wars with the throne; while, at the same time, knowledge and literary culture, from accidental circumstances, were not only held in honor, but had become a courtly fashion. Style, therefore, began to be regarded as a matter of consequence, and the choice of words, as the first step towards elevating and improving it, was attempted by those who wished to enjoy the favor of the highest class, that then gave its tone alike to letters and to manners. But a serious obstacle was at once found to such a choice of phraseology as was demanded. The language of Castile had, from the first, been dignified and picturesque, but it had never been rich. Juan de Mena, therefore, looked round to see how he could enlarge his poetical vocabulary; and if he had adopted means more discreet, or shown more judgment in the use of those to which he resorted, he might almost have modelled the Spanish into such forms as he chose.
As it was, he rendered it good service. He took boldly such words as he thought suitable to his purpose, wherever he found them, chiefly from the Latin, but sometimes from other languages.[659] Unhappily, he exercised no proper skill in the selection. Some of the many he adopted were low and trivial, and his example failed to give them dignity; others were not better than those for which they were substituted, and so were not afterwards used; and yet others were quite too foreign in their structure and sound to strike root where they should never have been transplanted. Much, therefore, of what Juan de Mena did in this respect was unsuccessful. But there is no doubt that the language of Spanish poetry was strengthened and its versification ennobled by his efforts, and that the example he set, followed, as it was, by Lucena, Diego de San Pedro, Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, the Manriques, and others, laid the true foundations for the greater and more judicious enlargement of the whole Castilian vocabulary in the age that followed.
Another poet, who, in the reign of John the Second, enjoyed a reputation which has faded away much more than that of Juan de Mena, is Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino, sometimes called De Illescas. His earliest verses seem to have been written in the time of John the First; but the greater part fall within the reigns of Henry the Third and John the Second, and especially within that of the last. A few of them are addressed to this monarch, and many more to his queen, to the Constable, to the Infante Don Ferdinand, afterwards king of Aragon, and to other distinguished personages of the time. From different parts of them, we learn that their author was a soldier and a courtier; that he was married twice, and repented heartily of his second match; and that he was generally poor, and often sent bold solicitations to every body, from the king downwards, asking for places, for money, and even for clothes.
As a poet, his merits are small. He speaks of Dante, but gives no proof of familiarity with Italian literature. In fact, his verses are rather in the Provençal forms, though their courtly tone and personal claims predominate to such a degree as to prevent any thing else from being distinctly heard. Puns, conceits, and quibbles, to please the taste of his great friends, are intruded everywhere; yet perhaps he gained his chief favor by his versification, which is sometimes uncommonly easy and flowing, and by his rhymes, which are singularly abundant and almost uniformly exact.[660]
At any rate, he was much regarded by his contemporaries. The Marquis of Santillana speaks of him as one of the leading poets of his age, and says that he wrote a great number of songs and other short poems, or decires, which were well liked and widely spread.[661] It is not remarkable, therefore, when Baena, for the amusement of John the Second and his court, made the collection of poetry which now passes under his name, that he filled much of it with verses by Villasandino, who is declared by the courtly secretary to be “the light, and mirror, and crown, and monarch of all the poets that, till that time, had lived in Spain.” But the poems Baena admired are almost all of them so short and so personal, that they were soon forgotten, with the circumstances that gave them birth. Several are curious, because they were written to be used, by persons of distinction in the state, such as the Adelantado Manrique, the Count de Buelna, and the Great Constable, all of whom were among Villasandino’s admirers, and employed him to write verses which passed afterwards under their own names. Of one short poem, a Hymn to the Madonna, the author himself thought so well, that he often said it would surely clear him, in the other world, from the power of the Arch-enemy.[662]
Francisco Imperial, born in Genoa, but in fact a Spaniard, whose home was at Seville, is also among the poets who were favored at this period, and who belonged to the same artificial school with Villasandino. The principal of his longer poems is on the birth of King John, in 1405, and most of the others are on subjects connected, like this, with transient interests. One, however, from its tone and singular subject, is still curious. It is on the fate of a lady, who, having been taken among the spoils of a great victory in the far East, by Tamerlane, was sent by him as a present to Henry the Third of Castile; and it must be admitted that the Genoese touches the peculiar misfortune of her condition with poetical tenderness.[663]
Of the remaining poets who were more or less valued in Spain, in the middle of the fifteenth century, it is not necessary to speak at all. Most of them are now known only to antiquarian curiosity. Of by far the greater part very little remains; and in most cases it is uncertain whether the persons whose names the poems bear were their real authors or not. Juan Alfonso de Baena, the editor of the collection in which most of them are found, wrote a good deal,[664] and so did Ferrant Manuel de Lando,[665] Juan Rodriguez del Padron,[666] Pedro Velez de Guevara, and Gerena and Calavera.[667] Probably, however, nothing remains of the inferior authors more interesting than a Vision composed by Diego de Castillo, the chronicler, on the death of Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon,[668] and a sketch of the life and character of Henry the Third of Castile, given in the person of the monarch himself, by Pero Ferrus;[669]—poems which remind us strongly of the similar sketches found in the old English “Mirror for Magistrates.”
But while verse was so much cultivated, prose, though less regarded and not coming properly into the fashionable literature of the age, made some progress. We turn, therefore, now to two writers who flourished in the reign of John the Second, and who seem to furnish, with the contemporary chronicles and other similar works already noticed, the true character of the better prose literature of their time.
The first of them is Fernan Gomez de Cibdareal, who, if there ever were such a person, was the king’s physician, and, in some respects, his confidential and familiar friend. He was born, according to the Letters that pass under his name, about 1386,[670] and, though not of a distinguished family, had for his godfather Pedro Lopez de Ayala, the great chronicler and chancellor of Castile. When he was not yet four-and-twenty years old, John the Second being still a child, Cibdareal entered the royal service and remained attached to the king’s person till the death of his master, when we lose sight of him altogether. During this long period of above forty years, he maintained a correspondence, to which we have already alluded more than once, with many of the principal persons in the state; with the king himself, with several of the archbishops and bishops, and with a considerable number of noblemen and men of letters, among the last of whom were Alfonso de Cartagena and Juan de Mena. A part of this correspondence, amounting to one hundred and five letters, written between 1425 and 1454, has been published, in two editions; the first claiming to be of 1499, and the last prepared in 1775, with some care, by Amirola, the Secretary of the Spanish Academy of History. Most of the subjects discussed by the honest physician and courtier in these letters are still interesting; and some of them, like the death of the Constable, which he describes minutely to the Archbishop of Toledo, are important, if they can be trusted as genuine. In almost all he wrote, he shows the good-nature and good sense which preserved for him the favor of leading persons in the opposite factions of the time, and which, though he belonged to the party of the Constable, yet prevented him from being blind to that great man’s faults, or becoming involved in his fate. The tone of the correspondence is simple and natural, always quite Castilian, and sometimes very amusing; as, for instance, when he is repeating court gossip to the Grand Justiciary of Castile, or telling stories to Juan de Mena. But a very interesting letter to the Bishop of Orense, containing an account of John the Second’s death, will perhaps give a better idea of its author’s general spirit and manner, and, at the same time, exhibit somewhat of his personal character.
“I foresee very plainly,” he says to the Bishop, “that you will read with tears this letter, which I write to you in anguish. We are both become orphans; and so has all Spain. For the good and noble and just King John, our sovereign lord, is dead. And I, miserable man that I am,—who was not yet twenty-four years old when I entered his service with the Bachelor Arrevalo, and have, till I am now sixty-eight, lived in his palace, or, I might almost say, in his bed-chamber and next his bed, always in his confidence, and yet never thinking of myself,—I should now have but a poor pension of thirty thousand maravedís for my long service, if, just at his death, he had not ordered the government of Cibdareal to be given to my son, who I pray may be happier than his father has been. But, in truth, I had always thought to die before his Highness; whereas he died in my presence, on the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen, a blessed saint, whom he greatly resembled in sorrowing over his sins. It was a sharp fever that destroyed him. He was much wearied with travelling about hither and thither; and he had always the death of Don Alvaro de Luna before him, grieving about it secretly, and seeing that the nobles were never the more quiet for it, but, on the contrary, that the king of Navarre had persuaded the king of Portugal to think he had grounds of complaint concerning the wars in Barbary, and that the king had answered him with a crafty letter. All this wore his heart out. And so, travelling along from Avila to Medina, a paroxysm came upon him with a sharp fever, that seemed at first as if it would kill him straightway. And the Prior of Guadalupe sent directly for Prince Henry; for he was afraid some of the nobles would gather for the Infante Don Alfonso; but it pleased God that the king recovered his faculties by means of a medicine I gave him. And so he went on to Valladolid; but as soon as he entered the city, he was struck with death, as I said before the Bachelor Frias, who held it to be a small matter, and before the Bachelor Beteta, who held what I said to be an idle tale.... The consolation that remains to me is, that he died like a Christian king, faithful and loyal to his Maker. Three hours before he gave up the ghost, he said to me: ‘Bachelor Cibdareal, I ought to have been born the son of a tradesman, and then I should have been a friar of Abrojo, and not a king of Castile.’ And then he asked pardon of all about him, if he had done them any wrong; and bade me ask it for him of those of whom he could not ask it himself. I followed him to his grave in Saint Paul’s, and then came to this lonely room in the suburbs; for I am now so weary of life, that I do not think it will be a difficult matter to loosen me from it, much as men commonly fear death. Two days ago, I went to see the queen; but I found the palace from the top to the bottom so empty, that the house of the Admiral and that of Count Benevente are better served. King Henry keeps all King John’s servants; but I am too old to begin to follow another master about, and, if God so pleases, I shall go to Cibdareal with my son, where I hope the king will give me enough to die upon.” This is the last we hear of the sorrowing old man, who probably died soon after the date of this letter, which seems to have been written in July, 1454.[671]
The other person who was most successful as a prose-writer in the age of John the Second was Fernan Perez de Guzman,—like many distinguished Spaniards, a soldier and a man of letters, belonging to the high aristocracy of the country, and occupied in its affairs. His mother was sister to the great Chancellor Ayala, and his father was a brother of the Marquis of Santillana, so that his connections were as proud and noble as the monarchy could afford; while, on the other hand, Garcilasso de la Vega being one of his lineal descendants, we may add that his honors were reflected back from succeeding generations as brightly as he received them.
He was born about the year 1400, and was bred a knight. At the battle of the Higueruela, near Granada, in 1431, led on by the Bishop of Palencia,—who, as the honest Cibdareal says, “fought that day like an armed Joshua,”—he was so unwise in his courage, that, after the fight was over, the king, who had been an eyewitness of his indiscretion, caused him to be put under arrest, and released him only at the intercession of one of his powerful friends.[672] In general, Perez de Guzman was among the opponents of the Constable, as were most of his family; but he does not seem to have shown a factious or violent spirit, and, after being once unreasonably thrown into prison, found his position so false and disagreeable, that he retired from affairs altogether.
Among his more cultivated and intellectual friends was the family of Santa María, two of whom, having been Bishops of Cartagena, are better known by the name of the see they filled than they are by their own. The oldest of them all was a Jew by birth,—Selomo Halevi,—who, in 1390, when he was forty years old, was baptized as Pablo de Santa María, and rose, subsequently, by his great learning and force of character, to some of the highest places in the Spanish Church, of which he continued a distinguished ornament till his death in 1432. His brother, Alvar Garcia de Santa María, and his three sons, Gonzalo, Alonso, and Pedro, the last of whom lived as late as the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, were, like the head of the family, marked by literary accomplishments, of which the old Cancioneros afford abundant proof, and of which, it is evident, the court of John the Second was not a little proud. The connection of Perez de Guzman, however, was chiefly with Alonso, long Bishop of Cartagena, who wrote for the use of his friend a religious treatise, and who, when he died, in 1435, was mourned by Perez de Guzman in a poem comparing the venerable Bishop to Seneca and Plato.[673]
The occupations of Perez de Guzman, in his retirement on his estates at Batres, where he passed the latter part of his life, and where he died, about 1470, were suited to his own character and to the spirit of his age. He wrote a good deal of poetry, such as was then fashionable among persons of the class to which he belonged, and his uncle, the Marquis of Santillana, admired what he wrote. Some of it may be found in the collection of Baena, showing that it was in favor at the court of John the Second. Yet more was printed in 1492, and in the Cancioneros that began to appear a few years later; so that it seems to have been still valued by the limited public interested in letters in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella.
But the longest poem he wrote, and perhaps the most important, is his “Praise of the Great Men of Spain,” a kind of chronicle, filling four hundred and nine octave stanzas; to which should be added a hundred and two rhymed Proverbs, mentioned by the Marquis of Santillana, but probably prepared later than the collection made by the Marquis himself for the education of Prince Henry. After these, the two poems of Perez de Guzman that make most pretensions from their length are an allegory on the Four Cardinal Virtues, in sixty-three stanzas, and another on the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Works of Mercy, in a hundred. The best verses he wrote are in his short hymns. But all are forgotten, and deserve to be so.[674]
His prose is much better. Of the part he bore in the Chronicle of John the Second notice has already been taken. But at different times, both before he was engaged in that work and afterwards, he was employed on another, more original in its character and of higher literary merit. It is called “Genealogies and Portraits,” and contains, under thirty-four heads, sketches, rather than connected narratives, of the lives, characters, and families of thirty-four of the principal persons of his time, such as Henry the Third, John the Second, the Constable Alvaro de Luna, and the Marquis of Villena.[675] A part of this genial work seems, from internal evidence, to have been written in 1430, while other portions must be dated after 1454; but none of it can have been much known till all the principal persons to whom it relates had died, and not, therefore, till the reign of Henry the Fourth, in the course of which the death of Perez de Guzman himself must have happened. It is manly in its tone, and is occasionally marked with vigorous and original thought. Some of its sketches are, indeed, brief and dry, like that of Queen Catherine, daughter of John of Gaunt. But others are long and elaborate, like that of the Infante Don Ferdinand. Sometimes he discovers a spirit in advance of his age, such as he shows when he defends the newly converted Jews from the cruel suspicions with which they were then persecuted. But he oftener discovers a willingness to rebuke its vices, as when, discussing the character of Gonzalo Nuñez de Guzman, he turns aside from his subject and says solemnly,—
“And no doubt it is a noble thing and worthy of praise to preserve the memory of noble families and of the services they have rendered to their kings and to the commonwealth; but here, in Castile, this is now held of small account. And, to say truth, it is really little necessary; for now-a-days he is noblest who is richest. Why, then, should we look into books to learn what relates to families, since we can find their nobility in their possessions? Nor is it needful to keep a record of the services they render; for kings now give rewards, not to him who serves them most faithfully, nor to him who strives for what is most worthy, but to him who most follows their will and pleases them most.”[676]
In this and other passages, there is something of the tone of a disappointed statesman, perhaps of a disappointed courtier. But more frequently, as, for instance, when he speaks of the Great Constable, there is an air of good faith and justice that do him much honor. Some of his portraits, among which we may notice those of Villena and John the Second, are drawn with skill and spirit; and everywhere he writes in that rich, grave, Castilian style, with now and then a happy and pointed phrase to relieve its dignity, of which we can find no earlier example without going quite back to Alfonso the Wise and Don Juan Manuel.