The starting-point of the classic school.
Mr Ticknor has made the very just remark, that the manner of the introduction of the later Italian influence into Spanish poetry enables us to see for once in a way exactly, when and at whose instigation a literary revolution was begun. The story is told by the best possible authority, by Juan Boscan, who was one of the leaders of the movement, in the long letter to the Duchess of Soma, which is printed as a preface to the second book of the collected works of himself and his friend Garcilaso de la Vega, published at Barcelona in 1543.[5] En (to give him his native title) Juan Boscan Almogaver was a Catalan of a noble family and of good estate. The date of his birth is uncertain, but it probably fell in the last years of the fifteenth century. He died in 1540 at Perpignan, where he had gone in discharge of his duty as ayo, or tutor, to that formidable person the great Duke of Alva. The story has been often told, but must needs be repeated in every history of Spanish literature. Boscan, who had already written verse in the old forms of the previous century, was a cultivated gentleman who had served in Italy, and had there acquired a good knowledge of the language. This he afterwards turned to account in a translation of Castiglione’s Courtier, which was considered by the Spaniards as not inferior to the original, and had great popularity. In 1526 he attended the Court at Granada, and there met Andrea Navagiero the Venetian ambassador. Navagiero urged him to write “in the Italian manner.” Boscan turned the advice over in his mind during his long ride back to Barcelona, and finally decided to act on it, though not without doubts, and not until he had been encouraged by a friend. This was the far more famous Garcia Laso de la Vega, whose names, according to a not uncommon custom, were combined into Garcilaso.[6] He was born in 1503 of a very ancient house of nobles of Toledo, and was killed by being hurled from a ladder while leading a storming-party at Frèjus in 1536. Little is known of their friendship, and indeed it would seem that they cannot have seen much of one another, for Boscan spent most of his life on his estate or at Court, whereas Garcilaso, who was first a page and then soldier to Charles V., lived, in common with all who followed “the conquering banners” of the emperor, on the march or on shipboard, from the Danube to Tunis.
The natural influence of Italy.
It would unquestionably be an error to conclude from the exact manner of its beginning that there would have been no Spanish imitation of Italian models if Boscan had not met Navagiero at Granada in 1526. Garcilaso, Diego de Mendoza, Gutierre de Cetina, and others, would no doubt have begun to write pastorals, epistles, and canzones “in the Italian manner” in any case. Allowing for the strength of the Italian influence of the day, the close kinship of the two languages, the frequent intercourse between the peoples, the ease with which Castilian could be run into a Tuscan mould, this was inevitable. Yet the story not only gives a curious incident in literary history, but it is characteristic of the classic poetry of Spain. Boscan we see took to playing with the foreign metres as a mere exercise of ingenuity, and as an amusement for his leisure. He implies that Garcilaso acted on the same motives as himself. With such a beginning there was an obvious danger that the Spaniards would work as mere pupils and produce only school exercises.
Prevalence of the classic school.
The ample following found by these two is itself a proof that Navagiero’s advice and Boscan’s docility were hardly necessary. It needed only an accident to provoke the literary activity of the Italianate Spaniards gathered round the emperor, in the Court of Rome, at Naples, and at home, where the “learned” men were all readers of Italian and of Latin. Greek was never much read in Spain, though a few of her scholars were good Hellenists. The ambition of the poets of the school of Boscan and Garcilaso is shown by their favourite epithet of praise—the word docto. The literal sense is “learned,” but educated expresses its true meaning more accurately. It did not necessarily imply much more than this, that the poet was familiar with Horace as well as with Sannazzaro and Ariosto, which, at a time when Latin was the language of education and diplomacy, and Italian was the language of society, hardly amounted to learning, in the full sense of the word. The seed fell on well-prepared soil. A quick and copious harvest sprang up, which for a time overshadowed all other forms of literary growth. The second half of the sixteenth century was the time of the learned poets of Spain. The school lasted, indeed, into the seventeenth century, but it had produced its best work before 1600.
Its aristocratic spirit.
The origin of this poetry would of itself lead us to expect to find it composed of imitators who produced more or less ingenious school exercises. Its works are extant to show that the expectation would be well founded. Again, we should expect to find that it was always much more of a society fashion than a manifestation of the real qualities of the Spaniard in literature, and here also experience will be found to confirm expectation. It was an aristocratic school, not perhaps quite so indifferent to appearing in print as some others have been, but still not uncommonly satisfied to leave its work in manuscript. These poets could afford to be indifferent to publication, since they did not thereby injure their fame in the only world to which they appealed. They were careless of the great unlearned public, whose tastes favoured the romances and the theatre. Manuscript copies sufficed for their own limited society. Luis de Leon, for instance, was the recognised chief of the Castilian learned poets in his lifetime, yet his works were not printed till they were brought out, forty years after his death, by Quevedo, in the idle hope of converting his countrymen from Góngorism by the sight of better examples, while Góngora was able to found a school of affectation by his influence, and yet his poems were not published during his lifetime. The learned poets did not expect to find readers among the vulgo, the common herd, of whose brutez, or bestial stupidity, they habitually spoke in a very high and mighty fashion. This attitude of superiority was not peculiar to the learned poets of Spain. It was habitual with the school of Ronsard, and indeed common to the whole Renaissance, which was emphatically scholarly and aristocratic. But though the pretensions of Spain’s learned poets were not different from those of the Italian, the Frenchman, or the Englishman, they were less fully justified. These very self-conscious “children of the Muses” were not so superior to the vulgar herd of writers of romances and coplas in poetic inspiration as to be entitled to look down upon them, on the strength of a certain mechanical dexterity acquired from foreigners by imitation.
What was imitated from the Italian.
The question what exactly it was that the innovators of the sixteenth century took from their Italian masters is easier to put than to answer. The mere imitation of Italian models was in itself no novelty. Cristobal de Castillejo denied the claim of the new school to originality in the writing of hendecasyllabics. They had, he said, already been written by Juan de Mena. So they had, and by Ausias March and other poets of the Catalan school also. The Marquess of Santillana had written sonnets on the Petrarchian model; the ottava rima and tercets were not unknown to the Court school of Castile or to the Catalans. The canzone had been written in Spain by imitators of the earlier Italian poetry. What then remained for the innovators to take? If we look at the names only, and the bare skeleton of the verse, little indeed; but when the manner of the execution is considered, a great deal. The Italian hendecasyllable, which the Spaniards allowed to be the original of their own line of eleven syllables, and of the line of ten with an accent on the final syllable, had become very monotonous in their hands. The cæsura fell with unvarying regularity after the fourth syllable. The innovators learnt to vary the pause, and thereby to give a new melody to the verse. It remained to them also to be more slavish in imitation than their predecessors had been. |Its technique and matter.| This slavishness was shown by the establishment of the endecasílabo piano, with the unaccented vowel termination as alone legitimate. Castilian abounds in vocablos agudos, in masculine rhymes, and was not under the same necessity as Italian to prefer the softer form. The Spanish poets were, we may suppose, influenced by the fact that the accented ending had become associated with comic verse among the Italians, and yet by submitting to a limitation which was not justified by the genius of their language, they began by impoverishing their poetic vocabulary, and they did it in pure unintelligent imitation. The restriction was not accepted without reluctance. Rengifo, who is the Spanish Puttenham[7]—the author, that is to say, of the standard work on the mechanism of verse written in Spain in the close of the sixteenth century—even puts in a plea for the verso agudo. He had good authorities to support him, for Garcilaso had dared to end a line with the word vestí. Boscan, who, however, is not accepted by the Spaniards as of unimpeachable authority, had been so left to himself as to end on nació, while Diego de Mendoza had done the evil thing “a thousand times.” According to the stop-watch of the new school this was wrong, and all three were duly pilloried for their offences in the Egemplar Poético—i.e., Ars Poetica—of Juan de la Cueva.[8]