CHAPTER XXI.
Family of the Manriques. — Pedro, Rodrigo, Gomez, and Jorge. — The Coplas of the Last. — The Urreas. — Juan de Padilla.
Contemporary with all the authors we have just examined, and connected by ties of blood with several of them, was the family of the Manriques,—poets, statesmen, and soldiers,—men suited to the age in which they lived, and marked with its strong characteristics. They belonged to one of the oldest and noblest races of Castile; a race beginning with the Laras of the ballads and chronicles.[677] Pedro, the father of the first two to be noticed, was among the sturdiest opponents of the Constable Alvaro de Luna, and filled so large a space in the troubles of the time, that his violent imprisonment, just before he died, shook the country to its very foundations. At his death, however, in 1440, the injustice he had suffered was so strongly felt by all parties, that the whole court went into mourning for him, and the good Count Haro—the same in whose hands the honor and faith of the country had been put in pledge a year before at Tordesillas—came into the king’s presence, and, in a solemn scene well described by the chronicler of John the Second, obtained for the children of the deceased Manrique a confirmation of all the honors and rights of which their father had been wrongfully deprived.[678]
One of these children was Rodrigo Manrique, Count of Paredes, a bold captain, well known by the signal advantages he gained for his country over the Moors. He was born in 1416, and his name occurs constantly in the history of his time; for he was much involved, not only in the wars against the common enemy in Andalusia and Granada, but in the no less absorbing contests of the factions which then rent Castile and all the North. But, notwithstanding the active life he led, we are told that he found time for poetry, and one of his songs, by no means without merit, which has been preserved to us, bears witness to it. He died in 1476.[679]
His brother, Gomez Manrique, of whose life we have less distinct accounts, but whom we know to have been both a soldier and a lover of letters, has left us more proofs of his poetical studies and talent. One of his shorter pieces belongs to the reign of John the Second, and one of more pretensions comes into the period of the Catholic sovereigns; so that he lived in three different reigns.[680] At the request of Count Benevente, he at one time collected what he had written into a volume, which may still be extant, but has never been published.[681] The longest of his works, now known to exist, is an allegorical poem of twelve hundred lines on the death of his uncle, the Marquis of Santillana, in which the Seven Cardinal Virtues, together with Poetry and Gomez Manrique himself, appear and mourn over the great loss their age and country had sustained. It was written soon after 1458, and sent, with an amusingly pedantic letter, to his cousin, the Bishop of Calahorra, son of the Marquis of Santillana.[682] Another poem, addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella, which is necessarily to be dated as late as the year 1474, is a little more than half as long as the last, but, like that, is allegorical, and resorts to the same poor machinery of the Seven Virtues, who come this time to give counsel to the Catholic sovereigns on the art of government. It was originally preceded by a prose epistle, and was printed in 1482, so that it is among the earliest books that came from the Spanish press.[683]
These two somewhat long poems, with a few that are much shorter,—the best of which is on the bad government of a town where he lived,—fill up the list of what remain to us of their author’s works. They are found in the Cancioneros printed from time to time during the sixteenth century, and thus bear witness to the continuance of the regard in which he was long held. But, except a few passages, where he speaks in a natural tone, moved by feelings of personal affection, none of his poetry can now be read with pleasure; and, in some instances, the Latinisms in which he indulges, misled probably by Juan de Mena, render the lines where they occur quite ridiculous.[684]
Jorge Manrique is the last of this chivalrous family that comes into the literary history of his country. He was the son of Rodrigo, Count of Paredes, and seems to have been a young man of an uncommonly gentle cast of character, yet not without the spirit of adventure that belonged to his ancestors,—a poet full of natural feeling, when the best of those about him were almost wholly given to metaphysical conceits, and to what was then thought a curious elegance of style. We have, indeed, a considerable number of his lighter verses, chiefly addressed to the lady of his love, which are not without the coloring of his time, and remind us of the poetry on similar subjects produced a century later in England, after the Italian taste had been introduced at the court of Henry the Eighth.[685] But the principal poem of Manrique the younger is almost entirely free from affectation. It was written on the death of his father, which occurred in 1476, and is in the genuinely old Spanish measure and manner. It fills about five hundred lines, divided into forty-two coplas or stanzas, and is called, with a simplicity and directness worthy of its own character, “The Coplas of Manrique,” as if it needed no more distinctive name.
Nor does it. Instead of being a loud exhibition of his sorrows, or, what would have been more in the spirit of the age, a conceited exhibition of his learning, it is a simple and natural complaint of the mutability of all earthly happiness; the mere overflowing of a heart filled with despondency at being brought suddenly to feel the worthlessness of what it has most valued and pursued. His father occupies hardly half the canvas of the poem, and some of the stanzas devoted more directly to him are the only portion of it we could wish away. But we everywhere feel—before its proper subject is announced quite as much as afterwards—that its author has just sustained some loss, which has crushed his hopes, and brought him to look only on the dark and discouraging side of life. In the earlier stanzas he seems to be in the first moments of his great affliction, when he does not trust himself to speak out concerning its cause; when his mind, still brooding in solitude over his sorrows, does not even look round for consolation. He says, in his grief,—
Our lives are rivers, gliding free
To that unfathomed, boundless sea,
The silent grave;
Thither all earthly pomp and boast
Roll, to be swallowed up and lost
In one dark wave.
Thither the mighty torrents stray,
Thither the brook pursues its way,
And tinkling rill.
There all are equal. Side by side
The poor man and the son of pride
Lie calm and still.
The same tone is heard, though somewhat softened, when he touches on the days of his youth and of the court of John the Second, already passed away; and it is felt the more deeply, because the festive scenes he describes come into such strong contrast with the dark and solemn thoughts to which they lead him. In this respect his verses fall upon our hearts like the sound of a heavy bell, struck by a light and gentle hand, which continues long afterwards to give forth tones that grow sadder and more solemn, till at last they come to us like a wailing for those we have ourselves loved and lost. But gradually the movement changes. After his father’s death is distinctly announced, his tone becomes religious and submissive. The light of a blessed future breaks upon his reconciled spirit; and then the whole ends like a mild and radiant sunset, as the noble old warrior sinks peacefully to his rest, surrounded by his children and rejoicing in his release.[686]
No earlier poem in the Spanish language, if we except, perhaps, some of the early ballads, is to be compared with the Coplas of Manrique for depth and truth of feeling; and few of any subsequent period have reached the beauty or power of its best portions. Its versification, too, is excellent; free and flowing, with occasionally an antique air and turn, that are true to the character of the age that produced it, and increase its picturesqueness and effect. But its great charm is to be sought in a beautiful simplicity, which, belonging to no age, is the seal of genius in all.
The Coplas, as might be anticipated, produced a strong impression from the first. They were printed in 1492, within sixteen years after they were written, and are found in several of the old collections a little later. Separate editions followed. One, with a very dull and moralizing prose commentary by Luis de Aranda, was published in 1552. Another, with a poetical gloss in the measure of the original, by Luis Perez, appeared in 1561; yet another, by Rodrigo de Valdepeñas, in 1588; and another, by Gregorio Silvestre, in 1589;—all of which have been reprinted more than once, and the first two many times. But in this way the modest Coplas themselves became so burdened and obscured, that they almost disappeared from general circulation, till the middle of the last century, since which time, however, they have been often reprinted, both in Spain and in other countries, until they seem at last to have taken that permanent place among the most admired portions of the elder Spanish literature, to which their merit unquestionably entitles them.[687]
The death of the younger Manrique was not unbecoming his ancestry and his life. In an insurrection which occurred in 1479, he served on the loyal side, and pushing a skirmish too adventurously, was wounded and fell. In his bosom were found some verses, still unfinished, on the uncertainty of all human hopes; and an old ballad records his fate and appropriately seals up, with its simple poetry, the chronicle of this portion, at least, of his time-honored race.[688]
Another family that flourished in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, and one that continued to be distinguished in that of Charles the Fifth, was marked with similar characteristics, serving in high places in the state and in the army, and honored for its success in letters. It was the family of the Urreas. The first of the name who rose to eminence was Lope, created Count of Aranda in 1488; the last was Gerónimo de Urrea, who must be noticed hereafter as the translator of Ariosto, and as the author of a treatise on Military Honor, which was published in 1566.
Both the sons of the first Count of Aranda, Miguel and Pedro, were lovers of letters; but Pedro only was imbued with a poetical spirit beyond that of his age, and emancipated from its affectations and follies. His poems, which he published in 1513, are dedicated to his widowed mother, and are partly religious and partly secular. Some of them show that he was acquainted with the Italian masters. Others are quite untouched by any but national influences; and among the latter is the following ballad, recording the first love of his youth, when a deep distrust of himself seemed to be too strong for a passion which was yet evidently one of great tenderness:—
In the soft and joyous summer-time,
When the days stretch out their span,
It was then my peace was ended all,
It was then my griefs began.
When the earth is clad with springing grass,
When the trees with flowers are clad;
When the birds are building up their nests,
When the nightingale sings sad;
When the stormy sea is hushed and still,
And the sailors spread their sail;
When the rose and lily lift their heads,
And with fragrance fill the gale;
When, burdened with the coming heat,
Men cast their cloaks aside,
And turn themselves to the cooling shade,
From the sultry sun to hide;
When no hour like that of night is sweet,
Save the gentle twilight hour;—
In a tempting, gracious time like this,
I felt love’s earliest power.
But the lady that then I first beheld
Is a lady so fair to see,
That, of all who witness her blooming charms,
None fails to bend the knee.
And her beauty, and all its glory and grace,
By so many hearts are sought,
That as many pains and sorrows, I know,
Must fall to my hapless lot;—
A lot that grants me the hope of death
As my only sure relief,
And while it denies the love I seek,
Announces the end of my grief.
Still, still, these bitterest sweets of life
I never will ask to forget;
For the lover’s truest glory is found
When unshaken his fate is met.[689]
The last person who wrote a poem of any considerable length, and yet is properly to be included within the old school, is one who, by his imitations of Dante, reminds us of the beginnings of that school in the days of the Marquis of Santillana. It is Juan de Padilla, commonly called “El Cartuxano,” or The Carthusian, because he chose thus modestly to conceal his own name, and announce himself only as a monk of Santa María de las Cuevas in Seville.[690] Before he entered into that severe monastery, he wrote a poem, in a hundred and fifty coplas, called “The Labyrinth of the Duke of Cadiz,” which was printed in 1493; but his two chief works were composed afterwards. The first of them is called “Retablo de la Vida de Christo,” or A Picture of the Life of Christ; a long poem, generally in octave stanzas of versos de arte mayor, containing a history of the Saviour’s life, as given by the Prophets and Evangelists, but interspersed with prayers, sermons, and exhortations; all very devout and very dull, and all finished, as he tells us, on Christmas eve in the year 1500.
The other is entitled “The Twelve Triumphs of the Twelve Apostles,” which, as we are informed, with the same accuracy and in the same way, was completed on the 14th of February, 1518; again a poem formidable for its length, since it fills above a thousand stanzas of nine lines each. It is partly an allegory, but wholly religious in its character, and is composed with more care than any thing else its author wrote. The action passes in the twelve signs of the zodiac, through which the poet is successively carried by Saint Paul, who shows him, in each of them, first, the marvels of one of the twelve Apostles; next, an opening of one of the twelve mouths of the infernal regions; and lastly, a glimpse of the corresponding division of Purgatory. Dante is evidently the model of the good monk, however unsuccessful he may be as a follower. Indeed, he begins with a direct imitation of the opening of the “Divina Commedia,” from which, in other parts of the poem, phrases and lines are not unfrequently borrowed. But he has thrown together what relates to earth and heaven, to the infernal regions and to Purgatory, in such an unhappy confusion, and he so mingles allegory, mythology, astrology, and known history, that his work turns out, at last, a mere succession of wild inconsistencies and vague, unmeaning descriptions. Of poetry there is rarely a trace; but the language, which has a decided air of yet elder times about it, is free and strong, and the versification, considering the period, is uncommonly rich and easy.[691]