CHAPTER XXVII.
Historical Narrative Poems. — Sempere. — Çapata. — Ayllon. — Sanz. — Fernandez. — Espinosa. — Coloma. — Ercilla and his Araucana, with Osorio’s Continuation. — Oña. — Gabriel Lasso de la Vega. — Saavedra. — Castellanos. — Centenera. — Villagra. — Religious Narrative Poems. — Blasco. — Mata. — Virues and his Monserrate. — Bravo. — Valdivielso. — Hojeda. — Diaz and others. — Imaginative Narrative Poems. — Espinosa and Others. — Barahona de Soto. — Balbuena and his Bernardo.
Epic poetry, from its general dignity and pretensions, is almost uniformly placed at the head of the different divisions of a nation’s literature. But in Spain, though the series of efforts in that direction begins early and boldly, and has been continued with diligence down to our own times, little has been achieved that is worthy of memory. The Poem of the Cid is, indeed, the oldest attempt at narrative poetry in the languages of modern Europe that deserves the name; and, composed, as it must have been, above a century before the appearance of Dante and two centuries before the time of Chaucer, it is to be regarded as one of the most remarkable outbreaks of poetical and national enthusiasm on record. But the few similar attempts that were made at long intervals in the periods immediately subsequent, like those we witness in “The Chronicle of Fernan Gonzalez,” in “The Life of Alexander,” and in “The Labyrinth” of Juan de Mena, deserve to be mentioned chiefly in order to mark the progress of Spanish culture during the lapse of three centuries. No one of them showed the power of the old half-epic Poem of the Cid.
At last, when we reach the reign of Charles the Fifth, or rather, when we come to the immediate results of that reign, it seems as if the national genius had been inspired with a poetical ambition no less extravagant than the ambition for military glory which their foreign successes had stirred up in the masters of the state. The poets of the time, or those who regarded themselves as such, evidently imagined that to them was assigned the task of worthily celebrating the achievements, in the Old World and in the New, which had really raised their country to the first place among the powers of Europe, and which it was then thought not presumptuous to hope would lay the foundation for a universal monarchy.
In the reign of Philip the Second, therefore, we have an extraordinary number of epic and narrative poems,—in all above twenty,—full of the feelings which then animated the nation, and devoted to subjects connected with Spanish glory, both ancient and recent,—poems in which their authors endeavoured to imitate the great Italian epics, already at the height of their reputation, and fondly believed they had succeeded. But the works they thus produced, with hardly more than a single exception, belong rather to patriotism than to poetry; the best of them being so closely confined to matters of fact, that they come with nearly equal pretensions into the province of history, while the rest fall into a dull, chronicling style, which makes it of little consequence under what class they may chance to be arranged.
The first of these historical epics is the “Carolea” of Hierónimo Sempere, published in 1560, and devoted to the victories and glories of Charles the Fifth, whose name, in fact, it bears. The author was a merchant,—a circumstance strange in Spanish literature,—and it is written in the Italian ottava rima; the first part, which consists of eleven cantos, being devoted to the first wars in Italy, and ending with the captivity of Francis the First; while the second, which consists of nineteen more, contains the contest in Germany, the Emperor’s visit to Flanders, and his coronation at Bologna. The whole fills two volumes, and ends abruptly with the promise of another, devoted to the capture of Tunis; a promise which, happily, was never redeemed.[790]
The next narrative poem in the order of time was published by Luis de Çapata, only five years later. It is the “Carlo Famoso,” devoted, like the last, to the fame of Charles the Fifth, and, like that, more praised than it deserves to be by Cervantes, when he places both of them among the best poetry in Don Quixote’s library. Its author declares that he was thirteen years in writing it; and it fills fifty cantos, comprehending above forty thousand lines in octave stanzas. But never was poem avowedly written in a spirit so prosaic. It gives year by year the life of the Emperor, from 1522 to his death at San Yuste in 1558; and, to prevent the possibility of mistake, the date is placed at the top of each page, and every thing of an imaginative nature or of doubtful authority is distinguished by asterisks from the chronicle of ascertained facts. Two passages in it are interesting, one of which gives the circumstances of the death of Garcilasso, and the other an ample account of Torralva, the great magician of the time of Ferdinand and Isabella;—the same person who is commemorated by Don Quixote when he rides among the stars. Such, however, as the poem is, Çapata had great confidence in its merits, and boastfully published it at his own expense. But it was unsuccessful, and he died regretting his folly.[791]
Diego Ximenez de Ayllon, of Arcos de la Frontera, who served as a soldier under the Duke of Alva, wrote a poem on the history of the Cid, and of some other of the early Spanish heroes, and dedicated it, in 1579, to his great leader. But this, too, was little regarded at the time, and is now hardly remembered.[792] Nor was more favor shown to Hippólito Sanz, a knight of the Order of Saint John, in Malta, who shared in the brave defence of that island against the Turks in 1565, and wrote a poetical history of that defence, under the name of “La Maltea,” which was published in 1582.[793]
Other poems were produced during the same period, not unlike those we have just noticed;—such as the “Historia Parthenopea” of Alfonso Fernandez, whose hero is Gonzalvo de Córdova; Espinosa’s continuation of the “Orlando Furioso,” which is not entirely without merit; “The Decade on the Passion of Christ,” by Coloma, which is grave and dignified, if nothing else;—all in the manner of the contemporary Italian heroic and narrative poems. But no one of them obtained much regard when it first appeared, and none of them can now be said to be remembered. Indeed, there is but one long poem of the age of Philip the Second which obtained an acknowledged reputation from the first, and has preserved it ever since, both at home and abroad;—I mean the “Araucana.”[794]
Its author, whose personal character is impressed on every part of his poem, was Alonso de Ercilla, third son of a gentleman of Biscayan origin,—a proud circumstance, to which the poet himself alludes more than once.[795] He was born in 1533, at Madrid, and his father, a member of the council of Charles the Fifth, was able, from his influence at court, to have his son educated as one of the pages of the prince who was afterwards Philip the Second, and whom the young Ercilla accompanied in his journeys to different parts of Europe between 1547 and 1551. In 1554, he was with Philip in England, when that prince married Queen Mary; and news having arrived there, as he tells us in his poem, of an outbreak of the natives in Chili which threatened to give trouble to their conquerors, many noble Spaniards then at the English court volunteered, in the old spirit of their country, to serve against the infidels.
Among those who presented themselves to join in this romantic expedition was Ercilla, then twenty-one years old. By permission of the prince, he says, he exchanged his civil for military service, and for the first time girded on his sword in earnest. But the beginning of the expedition was not auspicious. Aldrete, a person of military experience, who was in the suite of Philip, and under whose standard they had embarked in the enterprise, died on the way; and after their arrival, Ercilla and his friends were sent, under the less competent leading of a son of the viceroy of Peru, to achieve the subjugation of the territory of Arauco,—an inconsiderable spot of earth, but one which had been so bravely defended by its inhabitants against the Spaniards as to excite respect for their heroism in many parts of Europe.[796] The contest was a bloody one; for the Araucans were desperate and the Spaniards cruel. Ercilla went through his part of it with honor, meeting the enemy in seven severe battles, and suffering still more severely from wanderings in the wilderness, and from long exposure to the harassing warfare of savages.
Once he was in greater danger from his countrymen and from his own fiery temper than he was, perhaps, at any moment from the common enemy. In an interval of the war, when a public tournament was held in honor of the accession of Philip the Second to the throne, some cause of offence occurred during the jousting between Ercilla and another of the cavaliers. The mimic fight, as had not unfrequently happened on similar occasions in the mother country, was changed into a real one; and, in the confusion that followed, the young commander, who presided at the festival, rashly ordered both the principal offenders to be put to death,—a sentence which he reluctantly changed into imprisonment and exile, though not until after Ercilla had been actually placed on the scaffold for execution.
When he was released he seems to have engaged in the romantic enterprise of hunting down the cruel and savage adventurer, Lope de Aguirre, but he did not arrive in the monster’s neighbourhood till the moment when his career of blood was ended. From this time we know only, that, after suffering from a long illness, Ercilla returned to Spain in 1562, at the age of twenty-nine, having been eight years in America. At first, his unsettled habits made him restless, and he visited Italy and other parts of Europe; but in 1570 he married a lady connected with the great family of Santa Cruz, Doña María de Bazan, whom he celebrates at the end of the eighteenth canto of his poem. About 1576, he was made gentleman of the bed-chamber to the Emperor of Germany,—perhaps a merely titular office; and about 1580, he was again in Madrid and in poverty, complaining loudly of the neglect and ingratitude of the king whom he had so long served, and who seemed now to have forgotten him. During the latter part of his life, however, we almost entirely lose sight of him, and know only that he began a poem in honor of the family of Santa Cruz, and that he died as early as 1595.
Ercilla is to be counted among the many instances in which Spanish poetical genius and heroism were one feeling. He wrote in the spirit in which he fought; and his principal work is as military as any portion of his adventurous life. Its subject is the very expedition against Arauco which occupied eight or nine years of his youth; and he has simply called it “La Araucana,” making it a long heroic poem in thirty-seven cantos, which, with the exception of two or three trifles of no value, is all that remains of his works. Fortunately, it has proved a sufficient foundation for his fame. But though it is unquestionably a poem that discovers much of the sensibility of genius, it has great defects; for it was written when the elements of epic poetry were singularly misunderstood in Spain, and Ercilla, misled by such models as the “Carolea” and “Carlo Famoso,” fell easily into serious mistakes.
The first division of the Araucana is, in fact, a versified history of the early part of the war. It is geographically and statistically accurate. It is a poem, thus far, that should be read with a map, and one whose connecting principle is merely the succession of events. Of this rigid accuracy he more than once boasts; and, to observe it, he begins with a description of Arauco and its people, amidst whom he lays his scene, and then goes on through fifteen cantos of consecutive battles, negotiations, conspiracies, and adventures, just as they occurred. He composed this part of his poem, he tells us, in the wilderness, where he fought and suffered; taking the night to describe what the day had brought to pass, and writing his verses on fragments of paper, or, when these failed, on scraps of skins; so that it is, in truth, a poetical journal, in octave rhymes, of the expedition in which he was engaged. These fifteen cantos, written between 1555 and 1563, constitute the first part, which ends abruptly in the midst of a violent tempest, and which was printed by itself in 1569.
Ercilla intimates that he soon discovered such a description of successive events to be monotonous; and he determined to intersperse it with incidents more interesting and poetical. In his second part, therefore, which was not printed till 1578, we have, it is true, the same historical fidelity in the main thread of the narrative, but it is broken with something like epic machinery; such as a vision of Bellona, in the seventeenth and eighteenth cantos, where the poet witnesses in South America the victory of Philip the Second at Saint Quentin, the day it was won in France;—the cave of the magician Fiton, in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth cantos, where he sees the battle of Lepanto, which happened long afterwards, fought by anticipation;—the romantic story of Tegualda in the twentieth, and that of Glaura in the twenty-fourth: so that, when we come to the end of the second part,—which concludes, again, with needless abruptness, we find that we have enjoyed more poetry than we had in the first, if we have made less rapid progress in the history.
In the third part, which appeared in 1590, we have again a continuation of the events of the war, though with episodes such as that in the thirty-second and thirty-third cantos,—which the poet strangely devotes to a defence, after the manner of the old Spanish chronicles, of the character of Queen Dido from the imputations cast on it by Virgil,—and that in the thirty-sixth, in which he pleasantly gives us much of what little we know concerning his own personal history.[797] In the thirty-seventh and last, he leaves all his previous subjects, and discusses the right of public and private war, and the claims of Philip the Second to the crown of Portugal; ending the whole poem, as far as he himself ended it, with touching complaints of his own miserable condition and disappointed hopes, and his determination to give the rest of his life to penitence and devotion.
This can hardly be called an epic. It is an historical poem, partly in the manner of Silius Italicus, yet seeking to imitate the sudden transitions and easy style of the Italian masters, and struggling awkwardly to incorporate with different parts of its structure some of the supernatural machinery of Homer and Virgil. But this is the unfortunate side of the work. In other respects Ercilla is more successful. His descriptive powers, except in relation to natural scenery, are remarkable, and, whether devoted to battles or to the wild manners of the unfortunate Indians, have not been exceeded by any other Spanish poet. His speeches, too, are often excellent, especially the remarkable one in the second canto, given to Colócolo, the eldest of the Caciques, where the poet has been willing to place himself in direct rivalship with the speech which Homer, under similar circumstances, has given to Ulysses in the first book of the Iliad.[798] And his characters, so far as the Araucan chiefs are concerned, are drawn with force and distinctness, and lead us to sympathize with the cause of the Indians rather than with that of the invading Spaniards. Besides all this, his genius and sensibility often break through, where we should least expect it, and his Castilian feelings and character still oftener; the whole poem being pervaded with that deep sense of loyalty which was always a chief ingredient in Spanish honor and heroism, and which, in Ercilla, seems never to have been chilled by the ingratitude of the master to whom he devoted his life, and to whose glory he consecrated this poem.[799]
The Araucana, though one third longer than the Iliad, is a fragment; but, as far as the war of Arauco is concerned, it was soon completed by the addition of two more parts, embracing thirty-three additional cantos,—the work of a poet by the name of Osorio, who published it in 1597. Of its author, a native of Leon, we know only that he describes himself to have been young when he wrote it, and that in 1598 he gave the world another poem, on the wars of the knights of Malta and the capture of Rhodes. His continuation of the Araucana was several times printed, but has long since ceased to be read. Its more interesting portions are those in which the poet relates, with apparent accuracy, many of the exploits of Ercilla among the Indians;—the more absurd are those in which, under the pretext of visions of Bellona, an account is given of the conquest of Oran by Cardinal Ximenes, and that of Peru by the Pizarros, neither of which has any thing to do with the main subject of the poem. Taken as a whole, it is nearly as dull and chronicling as any thing of its class that preceded it.[800]
But there is one difficulty about both parts of this poem, which must have been very obvious at the time. Neither shows any purpose of doing honor to the commander in the war of Arauco, who was yet a representative of the great Mendoza family, and a leading personage at the courts of Philip the Second and Philip the Third. Why Osorio should have passed him over so slightly is not apparent; but Ercilla was evidently offended by the punishment inflicted on him after the unfortunate tournament, and took this mode of expressing his displeasure.[801] A poet of Chili, therefore, Pedro de Oña, attempted, so far as Ercilla was concerned, to repair the wrong, and, in 1596, published his “Arauco Subjugated,” in nineteen cantos, which he devoted expressly to the honor of the neglected commander. Oña’s success was inconsiderable, but was quite as much as he deserved. His poem was once reprinted; but, though it contains sixteen thousand lines, it stops in the middle of the events it undertakes to record, and has never been finished. It contains consultations of the infernal powers, like those in Tasso, and a love-story, in imitation of the one in Ercilla; but it is mainly historical, and ends at last with an account of the capture of “that English pirate Richerte Aquines,”—no doubt Sir Richard Hawkins, who was taken in the Pacific in 1594, under circumstances not more unlike those which Oña describes than might be expected in a poetical version of them by a Spaniard.[802]
But as the marvellous discoveries of the conquerors of America continued to fill the world with their fame, and to claim at home no small part of the interest that had so long been given to the national achievements in the Moorish wars, it was natural that the greatest of all the adventurers, Hernando Cortés, should come in for his share of the poetical honors that were lavishly scattered on all sides. In fact, as early as 1588, Gabriel Lasso de la Vega, a young cavalier of Madrid, stirred up by the example of Ercilla, published a poem, entitled “The Valiant Cortés,” which six years later he enlarged and printed anew under the name of “La Mexicana”; and in 1599, Antonio de Saavedra, a native of Mexico, published his “Indian Pilgrim,” which contains a regular life of Cortés in above sixteen thousand lines, written, as the author assures us, on the ocean, and in seventy days. Both are mere chronicling histories; but the last is not without freshness and truth, from the circumstance that it was the work of one familiar with the scenes he describes, and with the manners of the unhappy race of men whose disastrous fate he records.[803]
In the same year with the “Valiant Cortés” appeared the first volume of the lives of some of the early discoverers and adventurers in America, by Juan de Castellanos, an ecclesiastic of Tunja in the kingdom of New Granada; but one who, like many others that entered the Church in their old age, had been a soldier in his youth, and had visited many of the countries, and shared in many of the battles, he describes. It begins with an account of Columbus, and ends, about 1560, with the expedition of Orsua and the crimes of Aguirre, which Humboldt has called the most dramatic episode in the history of the Spanish conquests, and of which Southey has made an interesting, though painful, story. Why no more of the poem of Castellanos was published does not appear. More was known to exist; and at last, the second and third parts were found, and, with the testimony of Ercilla to the truth of their narratives, were published in 1847, bringing their broken accounts of the Spanish conquests in America, and especially in that part of it since known as Colombia, down to about 1588. The whole, except the conclusion, is written in the Italian octave stanza, and extends to nearly ninety thousand lines, in pure, fluent Castilian, which soon afterwards became rare, but in a chronicling spirit, which, though it adds to its value as history, takes from it all the best characteristics of poetry.[804]
Other poems of the same general character followed. One on the discovery and settlement of La Plata is by Centenera, who shared in the trials and sufferings of the original conquest,—a long, dull poem, in twenty-eight cantos, full of credulity, and yet not without value as a record of what its author saw and learned in his wild adventures. It contains, in the earlier parts, much irrelevant matter concerning Peru, and is throughout a strange mixture of history and geography, ending with three cantos devoted to “Captain Thomas Candis, captain-general of the queen of England,”—in other words, Thomas Cavendish, half gentleman, half pirate, whose overthrow in Brazil, in 1592, Centenera thinks a sufficiently glorious catastrophe for his long poem.[805] Another similar work on an expedition into New Mexico was written by Gaspar de Villagra, a captain of infantry, who served in the adventures he describes, and published his account in 1610, after his return to Spain. But both belong to the domain of history rather than to that of poetry.[806]
No less characteristic of the national temper and genius than these historical and heroic poems were the long religious narratives in verse produced during the same period and later. To one of these—that of Coloma on “The Passion of Christ,” printed in 1576—we have already alluded. Another, “The Universal Redemption,” by Blasco, first printed in 1584, should also be mentioned. It fills fifty-six cantos, and contains nearly thirty thousand lines, embracing the history of man from the creation to the descent of the Holy Spirit, and reading in many parts like one of the old Mysteries.[807] A third poem, by Mata, not unlike the last, extends through two volumes, and is devoted to the glories of Saint Francis and five of his followers; a collection of legends in octave stanzas, put together without order or picturesqueness, the first of which sets forth the meek Saint Francis in the disguise of a knight-errant. None of the three has any value.[808]
The next in the list, as we descend, is one of the best of its class, if not the very best. It is the “Monserrate” of Virues, the dramatic and lyric poet, so much praised by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. The subject is taken from the legends of the Spanish Church in the ninth century. Garin, a hermit living on the desolate mountain of Monserrate, in Catalonia, is guilty of one of the grossest and most atrocious crimes of which human nature is capable. Remorse seizes him. He goes to Rome for absolution, and obtains it only on the most degrading conditions. His penitence, however, is sincere and complete. In proof of it, the person he has murdered is restored to life, and the Madonna, appearing on the wild mountain where the unhappy man had committed his crime, consecrates its deep solitudes by founding there the magnificent sanctuary which has ever since made the Monserrate holy ground to all devout Spaniards.
That such a legend should be taken by a soldier and a man of the world as the subject of an epic would hardly have been possible in the sixteenth century in any country except Spain. But many a soldier there, even in our own times, has ended a life of excesses in a hermitage as rude and solitary as that of Garin;[809] and in the time of Philip the Second, it seemed nothing marvellous that one who had fought at the battle of Lepanto, and who, by way of distinction, was commonly called “the Captain Virues,” should yet devote the leisure of his best years to a poem on Garin’s deplorable life and revolting adventures. Such, at least, was the fact. The “Monserrate,” from the moment of its appearance, was successful. Nor has its success been materially diminished at any period since. It has more of the proper arrangement and proportions of an epic than any other of the serious poems of its class in the language; and in the richness and finish of its versification, it is not surpassed, if it is equalled, by any of those of its age. The difficulties Virues had to encounter lay in the nature of his subject and the low character of his hero; but in the course of twenty cantos, interspersed with occasional episodes, like those on the battle of Lepanto and the glories of Monserrate, these disadvantages are not always felt as blemishes, and, as we know, have not prevented the “Monserrate” from being read and admired in an age little inclined to believe the legend on which it is founded.[810]
The “Benedictina,” by Nicholas Bravo, was published in 1604, and seems to have been intended to give the lives of Saint Benedict and his principal followers, in the way in which Castellanos had given the lives of Columbus and the early American adventurers, but was probably regarded rather as a book of devotion for the monks of the brotherhood, in which the author held a high place, than as a book of poetry. Certainly, to the worldly that is its true character. Nor can any other than a similar merit be assigned to two poems for which the social position of their author, Valdivielso, insured a wider temporary reputation. The first is on the history of Joseph, the husband of Mary, written, apparently, because Valdivielso himself had received in baptism the name of that saint. The other is on the peculiarly sacred image of the Madonna, preserved by a series of miracles from contamination during the subjugation of Spain by the Moors, and ever since venerated in the cathedral of Toledo, to whose princely archbishop Valdivielso was attached as a chaplain. Both of these poems are full of learning and of dulness, enormously long, and comprehend together a large part of the history, not only of the Spanish Church, but of the kingdom of Spain.[811]
Lope’s religious epic and narrative poems, of which we have already spoken, appeared at about the same time with those of Valdivielso, and enjoyed the success that attended whatever bore the name of the great popular author of his age. But better than any thing of this class produced by him was the “Christiada” of Diego de Hojeda, printed in 1611, and taken in a slight degree from the Latin poem with the same title by Vida, but not enough indebted to it to impair the author’s claims to originality. Its subject is very simple. It opens with the Last Supper, and it closes with the Crucifixion. The episodes are few and appropriate, except one,—that in which the dress of the Saviour in the garden is made an occasion for describing all human sins, whose allegorical history is represented as if woven with curses into the seven ample folds of the mantle laid on the shoulders of the expiatory victim, who thus bears them for our sake. The vision of the future glories of his Church granted to the sufferer is, on the contrary, happily conceived and well suited to its place; and still better are the gentle and touching consolations offered him in prophecy. Indeed, not a little skill is shown, in the general epic structure of the poem, and its verse is uncommonly sweet and graceful. If the characters were drawn with a firmer hand, and if the language were always sustained with the dignity its subject demands, the “Christiada” would stand deservedly at the side of the “Monserrate” of Virues. Even after making this deduction from its merits, no other religious poem in the language is to be placed before it.[812]
In the same year, Alonso Diaz, of Seville, published a pious poem on another of the consecrated images of the Madonna; and afterwards, in rapid succession, we have heroic poems, as they are called, on Loyola, and on the Madonna, both by Antonio de Escobar;—one on the creation of the world, by Azevedo, but no more an epic than the “Week” of Du Bartas, from which it is imitated;—and one on “The Brotherhood of the Five Martyrs of Arabia,” by Rodriguez de Vargas; the last being the result of a vow to two of their number, through whose intercession the author believed himself to have been cured of a mortal disease. But all these, and all of the same class that followed them,—the “David” of Uziel,—Calvo’s poem on “The Virgin,”—Vivas’s “Life of Christ,”—Juan Dávila’s “Passion of the Man-God,”—the “Samson” of Enriquez Gomez,—another heroic poem on Loyola, by Camargo,—and another “Christiad,” by Encisso,—which bring the list down to the end of the century,—add nothing to the claims or character of Spanish religious narrative poetry, though they add much to its cumbersome amount.[813]
Of an opposite character to these religious poems are the purely, or almost purely, imaginative epics of the same period, whose form yet brings them into the same class. Their number is not large, and nearly all of them are connected more or less with the fictions which Ariosto, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, had thrown up like brilliant fireworks into the Italian sky, and which had drawn to them the admiration of all Europe, and especially of all Spain. There a translation of the “Orlando Furioso,” poor, indeed, but popular, had been published by Urrea as early as 1550. An imitation soon followed,—the one already alluded to, as made by Espinosa in 1555. It is called “The Second Part of the Orlando, with the True Event of the Famous Battle of Roncesvalles, and the End and Death of the Twelve Peers of France.” But at the very outset, its author tells us that “he sings the great glory of Spaniards and the overthrow of Charlemagne and his followers,” adding significantly, “This history will relate the truth, and not give the story as it is told by that Frenchman, Turpin.” Of course, we have, instead of the fictions to which we are accustomed in Ariosto, the Spanish fictions of Bernardo del Carpio and the rout of the Twelve Peers at Roncesvalles,—all very little to the credit of Charlemagne, who, at the end, retreats, disgraced, to Germany. But still, the whole is ingeniously connected with the stories of the “Orlando Furioso,” and carries on, to a considerable extent, the adventures of the personages who are its heroes and heroines.
Some of the fictions of Espinosa, however, are very extravagant and absurd. Thus, in the twenty-second canto, Bernardo goes to Paris and overthrows several of the paladins; and in the thirty-third, whose scene is laid in Ireland, he disenchants Olympia and becomes king of the island;—both of them needless and worthless innovations on the story of Bernardo, as it comes to us in the old Spanish ballads and chronicles. But in general, though it is certainly not wanting in giants and enchantments, Espinosa’s continuation of the Orlando is less encumbered with impossibilities and absurdities than the similar poem of Lope de Vega; and, in some parts, is very easy and graceful in its story-telling spirit. It ends with the thirty-fifth canto, after going through above fourteen thousand lines in ottava rima; and yet, after all, the conclusion is abrupt, and we have an intimation that more may follow.[814]
But no more came from the pen of Espinosa. Others, however, continued the same series of fictions, if they did not take up the thread where he left it. An Aragonese nobleman, Abarca de Bolea, wrote two different poems,—“Orlando the Lover” and “Orlando the Bold”;—and Garrido de Villena of Alcalá, who, in 1577, had made known to his countrymen the “Orlando Innamorato” of Boiardo, in a Spanish dress, published, six years afterwards, his “Battle of Roncesvalles”; a poem which was followed, in 1585, by one of Augustin Alonso, on substantially the same subject. But all of them are now neglected or forgotten.[815]
Not so the “Angelica” of Luis Barahona de Soto, or, as it is commonly called, “The Tears of Angelica.” The first twelve cantos were published in 1586, and received by the men of letters of that age with an extraordinary applause, which has continued to be echoed and reëchoed down to our own times. Its author was a physician in an obscure village near Seville, but he was known as a poet throughout Spain, and praised alike by Diego de Mendoza, Silvestre, Herrera, Cetina, Mesa, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes,—the last of whom makes the curate hasten to save “The Tears of Angelica” from the flames, when Don Quixote’s library was carried to the court-yard, crying out, “Truly, I should shed tears myself, if such a book had been burnt; for its author was one of the most famous poets, not only of Spain, but of the whole world.” All this admiration, however, was extravagant; and in Cervantes, who more than once steps aside from the subject on which he happens to be engaged to praise Soto, it seems to have been the result of a sincere personal friendship.
The truth is, that the Angelica, although so much praised, was never finished or reprinted, and is now rarely seen and more rarely read. It is a continuation of the “Orlando Furioso,” and relates the story of the heroine after her marriage, down to the time when she recovers her kingdom of Cathay, which had been violently wrested from her by a rival queen. It is extravagant in its adventures, and awkward in its machinery, especially in whatever relates to Demogorgon and the agencies under his control. But its chief fault is its dulness. Its whole movement is as far as possible removed from the life and gayety of its great prototype; and, as if to add to the wearisomeness of its uninteresting characters and languid style, one of De Soto’s friends has added to each canto a prose explanation of its imagined moral meanings and tendency, which, in a great majority of cases, it seems impossible should have been in the author’s mind when he wrote the poem.[816]
Of the still more extravagant continuation of the “Orlando” by Lope de Vega we have already spoken; and of the fragment on the same subject by Quevedo it is not necessary to speak at all. But the “Bernardo” of Balbuena, which belongs to the same period, must not be overlooked. It is one of the two or three favored poems of its class in the language; written in the fervor of the author’s youth, and published in 1624, when his age and ecclesiastical honors made him doubt whether his dignity would permit him any longer to claim it as his own.
It is on the constantly recurring subject of Bernardo del Carpio; but it takes from the old traditions only the slight outline of that hero’s history, and then fills up the space between his first presentation at the court of his uncle, Alfonso the Chaste, and the death of Roland at Roncesvalles, with enchantments and giants, travels through the air and over the sea, in countries known and in countries impossible, amidst adventures as wild as the fancies of Ariosto, and more akin to his free and joyous spirit than any thing else of the sort in the language. Many of the descriptions are rich and beautiful; worthy of the author of “The Age of Gold” and “The Grandeur of Mexico.” Some of the episodes are full of interest in themselves, and happy in their position. Its general structure is suited to the rules of its class,—if rules there be for such a poem as the “Orlando Furioso.” And the versification is almost always good;—easy where facility is required, and grave or solemn, as the subject changes and becomes more lofty. But it has one capital defect. It is fatally long;—thrice as long as the Iliad. There seems, in truth, as we read on, no end to its episodes, which are involved in each other till we entirely lose the thread that connects them; and as for its crowds of characters, they come like shadows, and so depart, leaving often no trace behind them, except a most indistinct recollection of their wild adventures.[817]