The king, disheartened by the loss of the minister on whose commanding genius he had so long relied, died in 1454. But Henry the Fourth, who followed on the throne of Castile, seemed even more willing to favor the great family of the Mendozas than his father had been. The Marquis, however, was little disposed to take advantage of his position. His wife died in 1455, and the pilgrimage he made on that occasion to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the religious poetry he wrote the same year, show the direction his thoughts had now taken. In this state of mind he seems to have continued; and though he once afterwards joined effectively with others to urge upon the king’s notice the disordered and ruinous state of the kingdom, yet, from the fall of the Constable to the time of his own death, which happened in 1458, the Marquis was chiefly busied with letters, and with such other occupations and thoughts as were consistent with a retired life.[615]
It is remarkable, that one, who, from his birth and position, was so much involved in the affairs of state at a period of great confusion and violence, should yet have cultivated elegant literature with earnestness. But the Marquis of Santillana, as he wrote to a friend and repeated to Prince Henry, believed that knowledge neither blunts the point of the lance, nor weakens the arm that wields a knightly sword.[616] He therefore gave himself freely to poetry and other graceful accomplishments; encouraged, perhaps, by the thought, that he was thus on the road to please the wayward monarch he served, if not the stern favorite who governed them all. One who was bred at the court, of which the Marquis was so distinguished an ornament, says, “He had great store of books, and gave himself to study, especially the study of moral philosophy and of things foreign and old. And he had always in his house doctors and masters, with whom he discoursed concerning the knowledge and the books he studied. Likewise, he himself made other books in verse and in prose, profitable to provoke to virtue and to restrain from vice. And in such wise did he pass the greater part of his leisure. Much fame and renown, also, he had in many kingdoms out of Spain; but he thought it a greater matter to have esteem among the wise than name and fame with the many.”[617]
The works of the Marquis of Santillana show, with sufficient distinctness, the relations in which he stood to his times and the direction he was disposed to take. From his social position, he could easily gratify any reasonable literary curiosity or taste he might possess; for the resources of the kingdom were open to him, and he could, therefore, not only obtain for his private study the poetry then abroad in the world, but often command to his presence the poets themselves. He was born in the Asturias, where his great family fiefs lay, and was educated in Castile; so that, on this side, he belonged to the genuinely indigenous school of Spanish poetry. But then he was also intimate with the Marquis of Villena, the head of the poetical Consistory of Barcelona, who, to encourage his poetical studies, addressed to him, in 1433, his curious letter on the art of the Troubadours, which Villena thus proposed to introduce into Castile.[618] And, after all, he lived chiefly at the court of John the Second, and was the friend and patron of the poets there, through whom and through his love of foreign letters it was natural he should come in contact with the great Italian masters, now exercising a wide sway within their own peninsula. We must not be surprised, therefore, to find that his own works belong more or less to each of these schools, and define his position as that of one who stands connected with the Provençal literature in Spain, which we have just examined; with the Italian, whose influences were now beginning to appear; and with the genuinely Spanish, which, though it often bears traces of each of the others, prevails at last over both of them.
Of his familiarity with the Provençal poetry abundant proof may be found in the Preface to his Proverbs, which he wrote when young, and in his letter to the Constable of Portugal, which belongs to the latter period of his life. In both, he treats the rules of that poetry as well founded, explaining them much as his friend and kinsman, the Marquis of Villena, did; and of some of the principal of its votaries in Spain, such as Bergédan, and Pedro and Ausias March, he speaks with great respect.[619] To Jordi, his contemporary, he elsewhere devotes an allegorical poem of some length and merit, intended to do him the highest honor as a Troubadour.[620]
But besides this, he directly imitated the Provençal poets. By far the most beautiful of his works, and one which may well be compared with the most graceful of the smaller poems in the Spanish language, is entirely in the Provençal manner. It is called “Una Serranilla,” or A Little Mountain Song, and was composed on a little girl, whom, when following his military duty, he found tending her father’s herds on the hills. Many such short songs occur in the later Provençal poets, under the name of “Pastoretas,” and “Vaqueiras,” one of which, by Giraud Riquier,—the same person who wrote verses on the death of Alfonso the Wise,—might have served as the very prototype of the present one; so strong is the resemblance between them. But none of them, either in the Provençal or in the Spanish, has ever equalled this “Serranilla” of the soldier; which, besides its inherent simplicity and liquid sweetness, has such grace and lightness in its movement, that it bears no marks of an unbecoming imitation, but, on the contrary, is rather to be regarded as a model of the natural old Castilian song, never to be transferred to another language, and hardly to be imitated with success in its own.[621]
The traces of Italian culture in the poetry of the Marquis of Santillana are no less obvious and important. Besides praising Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio,[622] he imitates the opening of the “Inferno” in a long poem, in octave stanzas, on the death of the Marquis of Villena;[623] while, in the “Coronation of Jordi,” he shows that he was sensible to the power of more than one passage in the “Purgatorio.”[624] Moreover, he has the merit—if it be one—of introducing the peculiarly Italian form of the Sonnet into Spain; and with the different specimens of it that still remain among his works begins the ample series which, since the time of Boscan, has won for itself so large a space in Spanish literature. Seventeen sonnets of the Marquis of Santillana have been published, which he himself declares to be written in “the Italian fashion,” and appeals to Cavalcante, Guido d’Ascoli, Dante, and especially Petrarch, as his predecessors and models; an appeal hardly necessary to one who has read them, so plain is his desire to imitate the greatest of his masters. The sonnets of the Marquis of Santillana, however, have little merit, except in their careful versification, and were soon forgotten.[625]
But his principal works were more in the manner then prevalent at the Spanish court. Most of them are in verse, and, like a short poem to the queen, several riddles, and a few religious compositions, are generally full of conceits and affectation, and have little value of any sort.[626] Two or three, however, are of consequence. One called “The Complaint of Love,” and referring apparently to the story of Macias, is written with fluency and sweetness, and is curious as containing lines in Galician, which, with other similar verses and his letter to the Constable of Portugal, show he extended his thoughts to this ancient dialect, where are found some of the earliest intimations of Spanish literature.[627] Another of his poems, which has been called “The Ages of the World,” is a compendium of universal history, beginning at the creation and coming down to the time of John the Second, with a gross compliment to whom it ends. It was written in 1426, and fills three hundred and thirty-two stanzas of double redondillas, dull and prosaic throughout.[628] The third is a moral poem, thrown into the shape of a dialogue between Bias and Fortune, setting forth the Stoical doctrine of the worthlessness of all outward good. It consists of a hundred and eighty octave stanzas in the short Spanish measure, and was written for the consolation of a cousin and much loved friend of the Toledo family, whose imprisonment in 1448, by order of the Constable, caused great troubles in the kingdom, and contributed to the final alienation of the Marquis from the favorite.[629] The fourth is on the kindred subject of the fall and death of the Constable himself, in 1453; a poem in fifty-three octave stanzas, each of two redondillas, containing a confession supposed to have been made by the victim on the scaffold, partly to the multitude and partly to his priest.[630] In both of the last two poems, and especially in the dialogue between Bias and Fortune, passages of merit are found, which are not only fluent, but strong; not only terse and pointed, but graceful.[631]
But the most important of the poetical works of the Marquis of Santillana is one approaching the form of a drama, and called the “Comedieta de Ponza,” or The Little Comedy of Ponza. It is founded on the story of a great sea-fight near the island of Ponza in 1435, where the kings of Aragon and Navarre, and the Infante Don Henry of Castile, with many noblemen and knights, were taken prisoners by the Genoese,—a disaster to Spain, which fills a large space in the old national chronicles.[632] The poem of Santillana, written immediately after the occurrence of the calamity it commemorates, is called a Comedy, because its conclusion is happy, and Dante is cited as authority for this use of the word.[633] But in fact it is a dream or vision; and one of the early passages in the “Inferno,” imitated at the very opening, leaves no doubt as to what was in the author’s mind when he wrote it.[634] The queens of Navarre and Aragon, and the Infante Doña Catalina, as the persons most interested in the unhappy battle, are the chief speakers. But Boccaccio is also a principal personage, though seemingly for no better reason than that he wrote the treatise on the Disasters of Princes; and after being addressed very solemnly in this capacity by the three royal ladies and by the Marquis of Santillana himself, he answers no less solemnly in his native Italian. Queen Leonora then gives him an account of the glories and grandeur of her house, accompanied with auguries of misfortune, which are hardly uttered before a letter comes announcing their fulfilment in the calamities of the battle of Ponza. The queen mother, after hearing the contents of this letter quite through, falls as one dead. Fortune, in a female form, richly attired, enters, and consoles them all; first showing a magnificent perspective of past times, with promises of still greater glory to their descendants, and then fairly presenting to them in person the very princes whose captivity had just filled them with such fear and grief. And this ends the Comedieta.
It fills a hundred and twenty of the old Italian octave stanzas,—such stanzas as are used in the “Filostrato” of Boccaccio,—and much of it is written in easy verse. There is a great deal of ancient learning introduced into it awkwardly and in bad taste; but there is one passage in which a description of Fortune is skilfully borrowed from the seventh canto of the “Inferno,” and another in which is a pleasing paraphrase of the Beatus ille of Horace.[635] The machinery and management of the story, it is obvious, could hardly be worse; and yet when it was written, and perhaps still more when it was declaimed, as it probably was before some of the sufferers in the disaster it records, it may well have been felt as an effective exhibition of a very grave passage in the history of the time. On this account, too, it is still interesting.
The Comedieta, however, was not the most popular, if it was the most important, of the works of Santillana. That distinction belongs to a collection of Proverbs, which he made at the request of John the Second, for the education of his son Henry, afterwards Henry the Fourth. It consists of a hundred rhymed sentences, each generally containing one proverb, and so sometimes passes under the name of the “Centiloquio.” The proverbs themselves are, no doubt, mostly taken from that unwritten wisdom of the common people, for which, in this form, Spain has always been more famous than any other country; but, in the general tone he has adopted, and in many of his separate instructions, the Marquis is rather indebted to King Solomon and the New Testament. Such as they are, however, they had—perhaps from their connection with the service of the heir-apparent—a remarkable success, to which many old manuscripts, still extant, bear witness. They were printed, too, as early as 1496; and in the course of the next century nine or ten editions of them may be reckoned, generally encumbered with a learned commentary by Doctor Pedro Diaz of Toledo. They have, however, no poetical value, and interest us only from the circumstances attending their composition, and from the fact that they form the oldest collection of proverbs made in modern times.[636]