In the latter part of his life, the fame of the Marquis of Santillana was spread very widely. Juan de Mena says, that men came from foreign countries merely to see him;[637] and the young Constable of Portugal—the same prince who afterwards entered into the Catalonian troubles, and claimed to be king of Aragon—formally asked him for his poems, which the Marquis sent with a letter on the poetic art, by way of introduction, written about 1455, and containing notices of such Spanish poets as were his predecessors or contemporaries; a letter which is, in fact, the most important single document we now possess touching the early literature of Spain. It is one, too, which contrasts favorably with the curious epistle he himself received on a similar subject, twenty years before, from the Marquis of Villena, and shows how much he was in advance of his age in the spirit of criticism and in a well-considered love of letters.[638]
Indeed, in all respects we can see that he was a remarkable man; one thoroughly connected with his age and strong in its spirit. His conduct in affairs, from his youth upwards, shows this. So does the tone of his Proverbs, that of his letter to his imprisoned cousin, and that of his poem on the death of Alvaro de Luna. He was a poet also, though not of a high order; a man of much reading, when reading was rare;[639] and a critic, who showed judgment, when judgment and the art of criticism hardly went together. And, finally, he was the founder of an Italian and courtly school in Spanish poetry; one, on the whole, adverse to the national spirit, and finally overcome by it, and yet one that long exercised a considerable sway, and at last contributed something to the materials which, in the sixteenth century, went to build up and constitute the proper literature of the country.
There lived, however, during the reign of John the Second, and in the midst of his court, another poet, whose general influence at the time was less felt than that of his patron, the Marquis of Santillana, but who has since been oftener mentioned and remembered,—Juan de Mena, sometimes, but inappropriately, called the Ennius of Spanish poetry. He was born in Córdova, about the year 1411, the child of parents respected, but not noble.[640] He was early left an orphan, and from the age of three-and-twenty, of his own free choice, devoted himself wholly to letters; going through a regular course of studies, first at Salamanca, and afterwards at Rome. On his return home, he became a Veinte-quatro of Córdova, or one of the twenty-four persons who constituted the government of the city; but we early find him at court on a footing of familiarity as a poet, and we know he was soon afterwards Latin secretary to John the Second, and historiographer of Castile.[641] This brought him into relations with the king and the Constable; relations important in themselves, and of which we have by accident a few singular intimations. The king, if we can trust the witness, was desirous to be well regarded in history; and, to make sure of it, directed his confidential physician to instruct his historiographer, from time to time, how he ought to treat different parts of his subject. In one letter, for instance, he is told with much gravity, “The king is very desirous of praise”; and then follows a statement of facts, as they ought to be represented, in a somewhat delicate case of the neglect of the Count de Castro to obey the royal commands.[642] In another letter he is told, “The king expects much glory from you”; a remark which is followed by another narrative of facts as they should be set forth.[643] But though Juan de Mena was employed on this important work as late as 1445, and apparently was favored in it, both by the king and the Constable, still there is no reason to suppose that any part of what he did is preserved in the Chronicle of John the Second exactly as it came from his hands.
The chronicler, however, who seems to have been happy in possessing a temperament proper for courtly success, has left proofs enough of the means by which he reached it. He was a sort of poet-laureate without the title, writing verses on the battle of Olmedo in 1445, on the pacification between the king and his son in 1446, on the affair of Peñafiel in 1449, and on the slight wound the Constable received at Palencia in 1452; in all which, as well as in other and larger poems, he shows a great devotion to the reigning powers of the state.[644]
He stood well, too, in Portugal. The Infante Don Pedro—a verse-writer of some name, who travelled much in different parts of the world—became personally acquainted with Juan de Mena in Spain, and, on his return to Lisbon, addressed a few verses to him, better than the answer they called forth; besides which, he imitated, with no mean skill, Mena’s “Labyrinth,” in a Spanish poem of a hundred and twenty-five stanzas.[645] With such connections and habits, with a wit that made him agreeable in personal intercourse,[646] and with an even good-humor which rendered him welcome to the opposite parties in the kingdom,[647] he seems to have led a contented life; and at his death, which happened suddenly in 1456, in consequence of a fall from his mule, the Marquis of Santillana, always his friend and patron, wrote his epitaph, and erected a monument to his memory in Torrelaguna, both of which are still to be seen.[648]
The works of Juan de Mena evidently enjoyed the sunshine of courtly favor from their first appearance. While still young, if we can trust the simple-hearted letters that pass under the name of the royal physician, they were already the subject of gossip at the palace;[649] and the collections of poetry made by Baena and Estuñiga, for the amusement of the king and the court, about 1450, contain abundant proofs that his favor was not worn out by time; for as many of his verses as could be found seem to have been put into each of them. But though this circumstance, and that of their appearance before the end of the century in two or three of the very earliest printed collections of poetry, leave no doubt that they enjoyed, from the first, a sort of fashionable success, still it can hardly be said they were at any time really popular. Two or three of his shorter effusions, indeed, like the verses addressed to his lady to show her how formidable she is in every way, and those on a vicious mule he had bought from a friar, have a spirit that would make them amusing anywhere.[650] But most of his minor poems, of which about twenty may be found scattered in rare books,[651] belong only to the fashionable style of the society in which he lived, and, from their affectation, conceits, and obscure allusions, can have had little value, even when they were first circulated, except to the persons to whom they were addressed, or the narrow circle in which those persons moved.
His poem on the Seven Deadly Sins, in nearly eight hundred short verses, divided into double redondillas, is a work of graver pretensions. But it is a dull allegory, full of pedantry and metaphysical fancies on the subject of a war between Reason and the Will of Man. Notwithstanding its length, however, it was left unfinished; and a certain friar, named Gerónimo de Olivares, added four hundred more verses to it, in order to bring the discussion to what he conceived a suitable conclusion. Both parts, however, are as tedious as the theology of the age could make them.
His “Coronation” is better, and fills about five hundred lines, arranged in double quintillas. Its name comes from its subject, which is an imaginary journey of Juan de Mena to Mount Parnassus, in order to witness the coronation of the Marquis of Santillana, both as a poet and a hero, by the Muses and the Virtues. It is, therefore, strictly a poem in honor of his great patron; and being such, it is somewhat singular that it should be written in a light and almost satirical vein. At the opening, as well as in other parts, it has the appearance of a parody on the “Divina Commedia”; for it begins with the wanderings of the author in an obscure wood, after which he passes through regions of misery, where he beholds the punishments of the dead; visits the abodes of the blessed, where he sees the great of former ages; and, at last, comes to Mount Parnassus, where he is present at a sort of apotheosis of the yet living object of his reverence and admiration. The versification of the poem is easy, and some passages in it are amusing; but, in general, it is rendered dull by unprofitable learning. The best portions are those merely descriptive.
But whether Juan de Mena, in his “Coronation,” intended deliberately to be the parodist of Dante or not, it is quite plain that in his principal work, called “The Labyrinth,” he became Dante’s serious imitator. This long poem—which he seems to have begun very early, and which, though he occupied himself much with its composition, he left unfinished at the time of his sudden death—consists of about twenty-five hundred lines, divided into stanzas; each stanza being composed of two redondillas in those long lines which were then called “versos de arte mayor,” or verses of higher art, because they were supposed to demand a greater degree of skill than the shorter verses used in the old national measures. The poem itself is sometimes called “The Labyrinth,” probably from the intricacy of its plan, and sometimes “The Three Hundred,” because that was originally the number of its coplas or stanzas. Its purpose is nothing less than to teach, by vision and allegory, whatever relates to the duties or the destiny of man; and the rules by which its author was governed in its composition are evidently gathered from the example of Dante in his “Divina Commedia,” and from Dante’s precepts in his treatise “De Vulgari Eloquentia.”
After the dedication of the Labyrinth to John the Second, and some other preparatory and formal parts, the poem opens with the author’s wanderings in a wood, like Dante, exposed to beasts of prey. While there, he is met by Providence, who comes to him in the form of a beautiful woman, and offers to lead him, by a sure path, through the dangers that beset him, and to explain, “as far as they are palpable to human understanding,” the dark mysteries of life that oppress his spirit. This promise she fulfils by carrying him to what she calls the spherical centre of the five zones; or, in other words, to a point where the poet is supposed to see at once all the countries and nations of the earth. There she shows him three vast mystical wheels,—the wheels of Destiny,—two representing the past and the future, in constant rest, and the third representing the present, in constant motion. Each contains its appropriate portion of the human race, and through each are extended the seven circles of the seven planetary influences that govern the fates of mortal men; the characters of the most distinguished of whom are explained to the poet by his divine guide, as their shadows rise before him in these mysterious circles.