This folly spread as rapidly as the imitation of Italian models had done. It was in vain that Lope argued against it for common-sense. He was himself conquered. Quevedo,[17] who attacked it, was driven to worse straits, for he endeavoured to resist it by means of another affectation, the conceptista, or conceited style, which is more like our “metaphysical” manner, but never had the popularity of Góngorism. The founder of this school of affectation was Alonso de Ledesma of Segovia (1552-1623). The poems which Quevedo published under the name of the Bachiller Francisco de la Torre were meant to reinforce Luis de Leon, and were free from either kind of fault; but the learned poetry of Spain had not vitality enough to throw off the disease. Góngorism became the literary taste of the day, and was soon traceable everywhere.
The Epics.
The great mass of epics, or so-called epics,[18] which form the non-lyric side of the learned poetry of Spain, belong with rare exceptions, if not with only one exception, to the domains of bibliography and curiosity. I have to confess that I do not speak with any personal knowledge of the Carolea of Hierónimo Sempere, published in 1560, or many others, and with only a slight acquaintance with the Carlo Famoso of Don Luis de Zapata. This second poem, published in 1565, is in 50 cantos, and contains 40,000 verses. The subject is the history of the Emperor Charles V., and it may stand here as a specimen of the whole class to which it belongs. The Carlo Famoso is essentially prose, disguised in such ottava rima stanzas as any one who had once acquired the trick could probably write as easily as prose pure and simple. If Don Luis de Zapata, who had served the emperor, had been content to tell us of what he saw in prose, he would probably have left a readable, and perhaps a valuable, book. But, unfortunately, he felt called upon to build the lofty rhyme, in imitation of Ariosto, and this brought with it the necessity for supernatural machinery, which the Don Luis de Zapatas of all countries are very ill qualified to handle. The ease with which verses of a kind are written in Spanish, the influence of a fashionable model, and the prestige attaching to the writing of verse, led to the production of innumerable volumes on historical subjects of what would fain have been poetry if it could. Some of this mass of writing is not without merit, the Elegies of Famous Men of the Indies—Elegias de Varones Ilustres de Indias—of Juan de Castellanos[19] is readable enough, and has some historical value. Juan de Castellanos, whose dates of birth and death are unknown, was an old soldier turned priest, who in common with many others could in a fashion write ottava rima stanza. He seems to have thought that “Elegy” meant much the same thing as “Eulogy,” and his Elegias are, in fact, a history of the conquest of America by the Spaniards, carried down to 1588. It is only a fragment, but even so, it fills a crown octavo volume of 563 pages in double columns. Of course there are by the side of work of this kind imitations of the Italian epic serious or humorous, which have no pretensions to a historical character. Here it was only to be expected that Lope de Vega would be among the most fluent and the most conspicuous, for it may be repeated that he tried his hand at whatever others were doing. The epics in the Italian form being popular, he wrote several; and as he had an unparallelled command of facile verse which always stopped short of becoming bad, he is never unreadable, though, as he was also only a very superior improvisatore, his poems never quite compel reading. The subject of the Dragontea—the last cruise and death of Sir Francis Drake in 1594—is so much more attractive to an Englishman than the Angelicas and Jerusalem Conquistadas, taken from Ariosto and Tasso, that one is perhaps prejudiced in its favour. And yet it seems to me to have a certain vitality not present in the rest, and to be by no means inferior to them in other respects.[20]
The Araucana.
The partiality of his countrymen and the too good-natured acquiescence of foreigners have given the name of epic to the Araucana of Alonso de Ercilla.[21] The author was a very typical Spaniard of his century. He was born in 1533, and came to England as page to Philip of Spain at the time of his marriage with Mary Tudor. It was from England that he sailed to Chili for the purpose of helping in the suppression of the revolt of the Araucans, which, became the subject of his poem. While on service he was condemned to death for drawing his sword on a brother officer. The sentence was remitted, but Ercilla resented it so bitterly that he entirely omitted the name of his general, the Marquis of Cañete, in his poem. He returned to Spain in 1565, and passed the remainder of his life, until his end in 1595, partly in endeavouring to secure a reward from the king for his services, and partly in compiling his great Araucana. It appeared in three parts in 1569, 1575, and 1590. The story told by himself, that he wrote it on pieces of leather and scraps of paper during his campaign, applies, therefore, only to the first part. It is only by a figure of speech that the Araucana can be described as an epic. Ercilla said that he found courage to print it because it was a true history of wars he had seen for himself. The first part is almost wholly occupied with the skirmishes of the Araucan war. In the later parts he was tempted to provide a proper epic machinery, but the change is only a proof of the tyranny of a fashion. Ercilla was a good handicraftsman of ottava rima stanzas, he wrote very fine Castilian, and his poem has unquestionable vitality. Yet it is, after all, hybrid. At its best it is a superior version of the Varones Ilustres of Castellanos, at its weakest an echo of the Italians. The literature of the world would have been richer, not poorer, if Ercilla had written memoirs on the model of his French contemporary Monluc.
The Italian influence which produced the learned poetry of Spain had its effect on Portugal also. The Portuguese remember Francisco de Sa de Miranda (1495-1558) as the first who began to shape their language for literary purposes, and the work was continued by Antonio Ferreira and Pedro de Andrade Caminha, his younger contemporaries and followers. My own knowledge of these writers is small, but as far as it goes it leads me to believe that Southey’s sound literary judgment had as usual led him right when he said that, “They rendered essential service to the language of their country, and upon that their claims to remembrance must rest.”[22] They are interesting in fact as examples of a general literary movement which started in Italy, and prevailed over all Western Europe. Southey did not note, and Portuguese writers have naturally not been forward to confess, how near Portugal came to having no modern literature in her own tongue. One of the two founders of the Spanish Italianate school was a Catalan who left the tongue of Muntaner and Ausias March to write Castilian. Had the political union of Spain and Portugal been a little closer, it is very possible that Portuguese would have shared the fate of Catalan. It would not have ceased to be spoken, but it would no longer have been the language of government and literature. Even as it was, Castilian had in Portugal something of the pre-eminence which mediæval French had had among neighbouring peoples. Portuguese who wrote their own tongue also wrote Castilian—even Camoens is in the list of those who used both languages. But the unity of the Peninsula was destined never to be completed, and Portuguese has escaped falling into the position of a dialect. Before the close of the sixteenth century it was illustrated by a poem which has at any rate “a world-wide reputation.”
The Lusiads.
It becomes the critic and historian of literature to approach works of great fame, which he cannot himself regard with a high degree of admiration, in a spirit of diffidence, or even of humility. I have to confess my own inability to feel the admiration other, and no doubt better, judges have felt for the Lusiads.[23] The pathetic circumstances of the life of the author, Luiz da Camoens (1524?-1580), are well known, and have perhaps served to prejudice the reader in favour of the poem. He was a Portuguese gentleman who served in the East Indies, who was ruined by shipwreck, and who ended his life in extreme misery in Lisbon. The foundation of the Lusiads is supplied by the famous voyage of Vasco da Gama round the Cape of Good Hope; but Camoens has worked in a great deal from Portuguese history, and the epic is written in honour of the people, not of the navigator. The matter is noble, but the execution is (of course I speak under correction) feeble. The merit of epic completeness and proportion which has been claimed for the Lusiads is not great in a writer who had Virgil to copy, and to whom the voyage of Gama supplied a coherent narrative, if not exactly a plot. It cannot be denied—and no one need wish to deny—that Camoens wrote his own language with great purity, and with that softness bordering, and sometimes more than bordering, on the namby-pamby, which the Portuguese love. He has a real tenderness, and a fine emotional sentimentality, while his patriotism is undeniable. But in spite of these merits, which at the best are fitter for the lyric than the scope of the epic, the Lusiads suffer from the fatal defects of prolixity and commonplace, both in language and thought. The supernatural machinery is an example of childish imitation. Camoens has introduced the heathen mythology together with the sacred names of his own religion. The Portuguese poet had many precedents for the combination, but he is not strong enough to make us endure its essential absurdity. The Lusiads has, in fact, the defect of all the learned poetry of the Peninsula—that it is very much of a school exercise. He saw his heathen gods and goddesses in Virgil, and transferred them bodily to his own Christian poem, not because they had any fit place there, but because they were ordered to be provided in the “receipt for making an epic poem.”[24]
The reader who compares the Lusiads, not with the Faërie Queen, which belongs to a very different mansion in the house of literature, but with the masterpieces of the class to which it really belongs, the purely literary epic, done by an accomplished writer according to rule, is, it may be, liable to be rendered impatient by the loud calls made on him for extreme admiration. He finds stanza following stanza of smooth, but somewhat nerveless, ottava rima, full of matter which might equally well be expressed in prose, and would not then appear to differ essentially from much of Hakluyt’s voyages. Now and then he will find incidents—the vision of the Spirit of the Cape, for example, and the episode of the island of Love—where the intention to be poetical is visible enough, but which do not come of necessity, and have no consequences. A tender lyric spirit there is, and that is what is most truly poetical and genuine in Camoens. And of that again there are better and more spontaneous examples in his sonnets. On the whole, one has to come to the conclusion that he was a real poet, though of no wide scope, who could express a certain tenderness and melancholy in forms he had learnt from the Italians, but who owes his great name mainly to the fact that he is the only man his country can quote as worthy to rank with the great poets of the world. Therefore he has a whole nation to sing his praise, and nobody is concerned to contradict.[25]