History of Spanish Literature, vol. 1 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

To carve, to play,

And make my way.[551]

The poem, its author tells us, was written in 1460, and we know that it continued popular long enough to pass through five editions before 1562. But portions of it are so indecent, that, when, in 1735, it was thought worth while to print it anew, its editor, in order to account for the large omissions he was obliged to make, resorted to the amusing expedient of pretending he could find no copy of the old editions which was not deficient in the passages he left out of his own.[552] Of course, Roig is not much read now. His indecency and the obscurity of his idiom alike cut him off from the polished portions of Spanish society; though out of his free and spirited satire much may be gleaned to illustrate the tone of manners and the modes of living and thinking in his time.

The death of Roig brings us to the period when the literature of the eastern part of Spain, along the shores of the Mediterranean, began to decline. Its decay was the natural, but melancholy, result of the character of the literature itself, and of the circumstances in which it was accidentally placed. It was originally Provençal in its spirit and elements, and had therefore been of quick, rather than of firm growth;—a gay vegetation, which sprang forth spontaneously with the first warmth of the spring, and which could hardly thrive in any other season than the gentle one that gave it birth. As it gradually advanced, carried by the removal of the seat of political power, from Aix to Barcelona, and from Barcelona to Saragossa, it was constantly approaching the literature that had first appeared in the mountains of the Northwest, whose more vigorous and grave character it was ill fitted to resist. When, therefore, the two came in contact, there was but a short struggle for the supremacy. The victory was almost immediately decided in favor of that which, springing from the elements of a strong and proud character, destined to vindicate for itself the political sway of the whole country, was armed with a power to which its more gay and gracious rival could offer no effective opposition.

The period, when these two literatures, advancing from opposite corners of the Peninsula, finally met, cannot, from its nature, be determined with much precision. But, like the progress of each, it was the result of political causes and tendencies which are obvious and easily traced. The family that ruled in Aragon had, from the time of James the Conqueror, been connected with that established in Castile and the North; and Ferdinand the Just, who was crowned in Saragossa in 1412, was a Castilian prince; so that, from this period, both thrones were absolutely filled by members of the same royal house; and Valencia and Burgos, as far as their courts touched and controlled the literature of either, were to a great degree under the same influences. And this control was neither slight nor inefficient. Poetry, in that age, everywhere sought shelter under courtly favor, and in Spain easily found it. John the Second was a professed and successful patron of letters; and when Ferdinand came to assume the crown of Aragon, he was accompanied by the Marquis of Villena, a nobleman whose great fiefs lay on the borders of Valencia, but who, notwithstanding his interest in the Southern literature and in the Consistory of Barcelona, yet spoke the Castilian as his native language, and wrote in no other. We may, therefore, well believe, that, in the reigns of Ferdinand the Just and Alfonso the Fifth, between 1412 and 1458, the influence of the North began to make inroads on the poetry of the South, though it does not appear that either March or Roig, or any one of their immediate school, proved habitually unfaithful to his native dialect.

At length, forty years after the death of Villena, we find a decided proof that the Castilian was beginning to be known and cultivated on the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1474, a poetical contest was publicly held at Valencia, in honor of the Madonna;—a sort of literary jousting, like those so common afterwards in the time of Cervantes and Lope de Vega. Forty poets contended for the prize. The Viceroy was present. It was a solemn and showy occasion; and all the poems offered were printed the same year by Bernardo Fenollar, Secretary of the meeting, in a volume which is valued as the first book known to have been printed in Spain.[553] Four of these poems are in Castilian. This leaves no doubt that Castilian verse was now deemed a suitable entertainment for a popular audience at Valencia. Fenollar, too, who wrote, besides what appears in this contest, a small volume of poetry on the Passion of our Saviour, has left us at least one cancion in Castilian, though his works were otherwise in his native dialect, and were composed apparently for the amusement of his friends in Valencia, where he was a person of consideration, and in whose University, founded in 1499, he was a professor.[554]

Probably Castilian poetry was rarely written in Valencia during the fifteenth century, while, on the other hand, Valencian was written constantly. “The Suit of the Olives,” for instance, wholly in that dialect, was composed by Jaume Gazull, Fenollar, and Juan Moreno, who seem to have been personal friends, and who united their poetical resources to produce this satire, in which, under the allegory of olive-trees, and in language not always so modest as good taste requires, they discuss together the dangers to which the young and the old are respectively exposed from the solicitations of worldly pleasure.[555] Another dialogue, by the same three poets, in the same dialect, soon followed, dated in 1497, which is supposed to have occurred in the bed-chamber of a lady just recovering from the birth of a child, in which is examined the question whether young men or old make the best husbands; an inquiry decided by Venus in favor of the young, and ended, most inappropriately, by a religious hymn.[556] Other poets were equally faithful to their vernacular; among whom were Juan Escriva, ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns to the Pope, in 1497, who was probably the last person of high rank that wrote in it;[557] and Vincent Ferrandis, concerned in a poetical contest in honor of Saint Catherine of Siena, at Valencia, in 1511, whose poems seem, on other occasions, to have carried off public honors, and to have been, from their sweetness and power, worthy of the distinction they won.[558]

Meantime, Valencian poets are not wanting who wrote more or less in Castilian. Francisco Castelví, a friend of Fenollar, is one of them.[559] Another is Narcis Viñoles, who flourished in 1500, who wrote in Tuscan as well as in Castilian and Valencian, and who evidently thought his native dialect somewhat barbarous.[560] A third is Juan Tallante, whose religious poems are found at the opening of the old General Cancionero.[561] A fourth is Luis Crespi, member of the ancient family of Valdaura, and in 1506 head of the University of Valencia.[562] And among the latest, if not the very last, was Fernandez de Heredia, who died in 1549, of whom we have hardly any thing in Valencian, but much in Castilian.[563] Indeed, that the Castilian, in the early part of the century, had obtained a real supremacy in whatever there was of poetry and elegant literature along the shores of the Mediterranean cannot be doubted; for, before the death of Heredia, Boscan had already deserted his native Catalonian, and begun to form a school in Spanish literature that has never since disappeared; and shortly afterwards, Timoneda and his followers showed, by their successful representation of Castilian farces in the public squares of Valencia, that the ancient dialect had ceased to be insisted upon in its own capital. The language of the court of Castile had, for such purposes, become the prevailing language of all the South.

This, in fact, was the circumstance that determined the fate of all that remained in Spain on the foundations of the Provençal refinement. The crowns of Aragon and Castile had been united by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella; the court had been removed from Saragossa, though that city still claimed the dignity of being regarded as an independent capital; and with the tide of empire, that of cultivation gradually flowed down from the West and the North. Some of the poets of the South have, it is true, in later times, ventured to write in their native dialects. The most remarkable of them is Vicent Garcia, who was a friend of Lope de Vega, and died in 1623.[564] But his poetry, in all its various phases, is a mixture of several dialects, and shows, notwithstanding its provincial air, the influence of the court of Philip the Fourth, where its author for a time lived; while the poetry printed later, or heard in our own days on the popular theatres of Barcelona and Valencia, is in a dialect so grossly corrupted, that it is no longer easy to acknowledge it as that of the descendants of Muntaner and March.[565]

The degradation of the two more refined dialects in the southern and eastern parts of Spain, which was begun in the time of the Catholic sovereigns, may be considered as completed when the seat of the national government was settled, first in Old and afterwards in New Castile; since, by this circumstance, the prevalent authority of the Castilian was finally recognized and insured. The change was certainly neither unreasonable nor ill-timed. The language of the North was already more ample, more vigorous, and more rich in idiomatic constructions; indeed, in almost every respect, better fitted to become national than that of the South. And yet we can hardly follow and witness the results of such a revolution but with feelings of a natural regret; for the slow decay and final disappearance of any language bring with them melancholy thoughts, which are, in some sort, peculiar to the occasion. We feel as if a portion of the world’s intelligence were extinguished; as if we were ourselves cut off from a part of the intellectual inheritance, to which we had in many respects an equal right with those who destroyed it, and which they were bound to pass down to us unimpaired as they themselves had received it. The same feeling pursues us even when, as in the case of the Greek or Latin, the people that spoke it had risen to the full height of their refinement, and left behind them monuments by which all future times can measure and share their glory. But our regret is deeper when the language of a people is cut off in its youth, before its character is fully developed; when its poetical attributes are just beginning to appear, and when all is bright with promise and hope.[566]