The Later Renaissance

by David Hannay

The inheritance from the fifteenth century.

Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454) had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself entirely foreign in origin—being, in truth, little more than an echo of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante, and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French rhétoriqueurs. Indeed the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of poetry in the Gai Saber of Provence. The troubadours, when driven from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief Ars Poetica to one of those collections of lyric verse called Cancioneros, and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish.

Spanish verse.

What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables. His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo, sank into mechanical verse-making—mostly in eight-syllabled couplets, relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the troubadour school of Castile. The rhythmus de contemptu mundi, known as the coplas de Manrique, which has been made known to English readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes monotonous. It is in this, that the coplas give us perhaps the finest expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he himself calls in his own untranslatable word el desengaño—that is to say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and “the frailty of all things here”—not in puling self-pity, but in manly and pious resignation to fate and necessity.

The Cancioneros.

This old or troubadour school did not give up the field to the new Italian influence without a struggle. Its models continued to be imitated nearly all through the sixteenth century. It was praised and regretted by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. Boscan and Garcilaso found an opponent and a critic in Cristobal de Castillejo, a very fluent verse-writer, a most worthy man, and a loyal servant of the house of Austria, who died in exile at Vienna in 1556. El buen de Castillejo—the good Castillejo, as he is commonly called, with condescending kindness—was an excellent example of the stamp of critic, more or less common in all times, who judges of poetry exclusively by his own stop-watch. He condemned Boscan and Garcilaso, not for writing bad poetry, but for not writing according to what he considered the orthodox model. The new school not unnaturally retorted by wholesale condemnation of the old. When Hernan, or Fernan, de Herrera published his edition of Garcilaso in 1572, he was rebuked for quoting Juan del Encina in the commentary. A pamphleteer, believed to have been no less a person than the Admiral of Castile, whose likeness may be seen in the National Portrait Gallery among the ambassadors who signed the peace at the beginning of the reign of James I., laughed at Herrera for quoting as an authority one who had become a name for a bad poet. This was pedantry as bad as Castillejo’s, and represented an opinion never generally accepted by the Spaniards. They continued to read the collections of ancient verse called Cancioneros, even when the new school was at the height of its vigour. The Cancioneros Generales of Hernan del Castillo, the great storehouse of the poetry of the fifteenth century, was reprinted, with some changes, no less than nine times between 1511 and 1573. The extreme rarity of copies of these numerous editions proves that they must have been well thumbed to pieces by admiring readers. Yet they constitute no inconsiderable body of literature. The modern reprint issued (unfortunately only to its own members) by the Sociedad de Bibliófilos Españoles is in two weighty volumes.

The romances.

In this Cancionero there are two elements, destined to very different fates. Hernan del Castillo included eighteen romances in his collection, and they reappeared in subsequent editions. The importance of this word in Spanish literature seems to call for some definition of its scope. The word “romance” bore originally in Spanish exactly the same meaning as in other tongues descended from the Latin. It was the vernacular, and to write en romance was to write Castilian, Galician, or Catalan. “Ni romance ni romano”—neither Romance nor Roman—is a phrase bearing more or less the meaning of our “neither rhyme nor reason.” But little by little, by use and wont, it came about the end of the sixteenth century to be applied exclusively to the form of verse dearest and most native to the Spaniard, the already mentioned trochaic eight-syllable assonant metre. As the ancient ballads are mainly, though not exclusively, written in this form, they are called romances. Yet to write romances does not necessarily mean to write ballads, but only to write in that metre, whether in the dialogue of a play or in long narrative poems, or for any other purpose.

The assonant metre, as is well known, is not peculiar to Spain. It may well have been imported into Castile from France by those churchmen to whom the country owes so much of its architecture, what learning it had, and its civilisation when it began to revive from the merely martial barbarism produced by the Moorish conquest. But if the Spaniard did indeed take the assonant metre from his French teachers, he soon subjected it to that process which all forms of verse are apt to undergo in his hands. He released it from shackles, and gave it a freedom amounting to licence. The romance is a loose-flowing rhythm, in which the rhyme is made by the last accented vowel. Sometimes the same vowel is used line after line until it is exhausted. More commonly the assonant comes in alternate lines. As a rule there is no division into stanzas, but the verse runs on till the speech is ended, or the tale is told. To this there are, however, exceptions, and the romance is divided into redondillas—that is, roundels or staves of four lines, assonanced either alternately, or the first with the fourth and the second with the third, or into quintillas of five lines, with an assonant in three. The recalcitrance of the Spaniard to all limitations in verse-making has caused him to give a very wide range indeed to the assonant. The vowel u is allowed to rhyme with o, and i with e, though they have a very different sound and force. The Spaniard, again, allows a diphthong to be assonant to a vowel, although he pronounces both the vowels in his diphthongs. It will be seen that such verse as this can be written with extreme facility. Indeed it is a byword in Spain that nothing is easier than to write romances—badly. The difficulty, in fact, is to avoid writing them in prose; and it is no small one, when the ear of a people finds a rhyme in so faint a similarity of sound, and in a language in which the accent is at once so pronounced and as little varied. It is not, I trust, superfluous to add that in Castilian, which we call Spanish, there is a marked accent in the last syllable of words ending in a consonant, on the penult of words ending in a vowel, while a limited number of words are esdrujulo—that is, accented on the antepenult. The addition of a syllable to form the plural, or of the adverbial termination mente, does not alter the place of the accent. These rules, though nowise severe, are not rigidly followed. Not infrequently the assonant rhyme falls into the full or consonant rhyme, while the liesse or stave formed on one vowel, and its equivalents, is broken by a line corresponding to nothing. Even the rule requiring the use of eight syllables is applied with restrictions,—an accented syllable at the end counts as two, while two unaccented syllables rank only as one. It must be acknowledged that this metre is unsatisfactory to an ear attuned to the melody of English poetry. In our language it renders hardly a tinkle. When we have become accustomed to it in Castilian—and until we do it tantalises with a sense of something wanting—its highest virtue seems to be that it keeps the voice of the speaker in a chanted recitative. It is more akin to numbered prose than to verse.