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

by George Ticknor

But now, in the time of John the Second, though the affairs of the country were hardly more composed, they had taken the character rather of feuds between the great nobles than of wars with the throne; while, at the same time, knowledge and literary culture, from accidental circumstances, were not only held in honor, but had become a courtly fashion. Style, therefore, began to be regarded as a matter of consequence, and the choice of words, as the first step towards elevating and improving it, was attempted by those who wished to enjoy the favor of the highest class, that then gave its tone alike to letters and to manners. But a serious obstacle was at once found to such a choice of phraseology as was demanded. The language of Castile had, from the first, been dignified and picturesque, but it had never been rich. Juan de Mena, therefore, looked round to see how he could enlarge his poetical vocabulary; and if he had adopted means more discreet, or shown more judgment in the use of those to which he resorted, he might almost have modelled the Spanish into such forms as he chose.

As it was, he rendered it good service. He took boldly such words as he thought suitable to his purpose, wherever he found them, chiefly from the Latin, but sometimes from other languages.[659] Unhappily, he exercised no proper skill in the selection. Some of the many he adopted were low and trivial, and his example failed to give them dignity; others were not better than those for which they were substituted, and so were not afterwards used; and yet others were quite too foreign in their structure and sound to strike root where they should never have been transplanted. Much, therefore, of what Juan de Mena did in this respect was unsuccessful. But there is no doubt that the language of Spanish poetry was strengthened and its versification ennobled by his efforts, and that the example he set, followed, as it was, by Lucena, Diego de San Pedro, Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, the Manriques, and others, laid the true foundations for the greater and more judicious enlargement of the whole Castilian vocabulary in the age that followed.

Another poet, who, in the reign of John the Second, enjoyed a reputation which has faded away much more than that of Juan de Mena, is Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino, sometimes called De Illescas. His earliest verses seem to have been written in the time of John the First; but the greater part fall within the reigns of Henry the Third and John the Second, and especially within that of the last. A few of them are addressed to this monarch, and many more to his queen, to the Constable, to the Infante Don Ferdinand, afterwards king of Aragon, and to other distinguished personages of the time. From different parts of them, we learn that their author was a soldier and a courtier; that he was married twice, and repented heartily of his second match; and that he was generally poor, and often sent bold solicitations to every body, from the king downwards, asking for places, for money, and even for clothes.

As a poet, his merits are small. He speaks of Dante, but gives no proof of familiarity with Italian literature. In fact, his verses are rather in the Provençal forms, though their courtly tone and personal claims predominate to such a degree as to prevent any thing else from being distinctly heard. Puns, conceits, and quibbles, to please the taste of his great friends, are intruded everywhere; yet perhaps he gained his chief favor by his versification, which is sometimes uncommonly easy and flowing, and by his rhymes, which are singularly abundant and almost uniformly exact.[660]

At any rate, he was much regarded by his contemporaries. The Marquis of Santillana speaks of him as one of the leading poets of his age, and says that he wrote a great number of songs and other short poems, or decires, which were well liked and widely spread.[661] It is not remarkable, therefore, when Baena, for the amusement of John the Second and his court, made the collection of poetry which now passes under his name, that he filled much of it with verses by Villasandino, who is declared by the courtly secretary to be “the light, and mirror, and crown, and monarch of all the poets that, till that time, had lived in Spain.” But the poems Baena admired are almost all of them so short and so personal, that they were soon forgotten, with the circumstances that gave them birth. Several are curious, because they were written to be used, by persons of distinction in the state, such as the Adelantado Manrique, the Count de Buelna, and the Great Constable, all of whom were among Villasandino’s admirers, and employed him to write verses which passed afterwards under their own names. Of one short poem, a Hymn to the Madonna, the author himself thought so well, that he often said it would surely clear him, in the other world, from the power of the Arch-enemy.[662]

Francisco Imperial, born in Genoa, but in fact a Spaniard, whose home was at Seville, is also among the poets who were favored at this period, and who belonged to the same artificial school with Villasandino. The principal of his longer poems is on the birth of King John, in 1405, and most of the others are on subjects connected, like this, with transient interests. One, however, from its tone and singular subject, is still curious. It is on the fate of a lady, who, having been taken among the spoils of a great victory in the far East, by Tamerlane, was sent by him as a present to Henry the Third of Castile; and it must be admitted that the Genoese touches the peculiar misfortune of her condition with poetical tenderness.[663]

Of the remaining poets who were more or less valued in Spain, in the middle of the fifteenth century, it is not necessary to speak at all. Most of them are now known only to antiquarian curiosity. Of by far the greater part very little remains; and in most cases it is uncertain whether the persons whose names the poems bear were their real authors or not. Juan Alfonso de Baena, the editor of the collection in which most of them are found, wrote a good deal,[664] and so did Ferrant Manuel de Lando,[665] Juan Rodriguez del Padron,[666] Pedro Velez de Guevara, and Gerena and Calavera.[667] Probably, however, nothing remains of the inferior authors more interesting than a Vision composed by Diego de Castillo, the chronicler, on the death of Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon,[668] and a sketch of the life and character of Henry the Third of Castile, given in the person of the monarch himself, by Pero Ferrus;[669]—poems which remind us strongly of the similar sketches found in the old English “Mirror for Magistrates.”

But while verse was so much cultivated, prose, though less regarded and not coming properly into the fashionable literature of the age, made some progress. We turn, therefore, now to two writers who flourished in the reign of John the Second, and who seem to furnish, with the contemporary chronicles and other similar works already noticed, the true character of the better prose literature of their time.

The first of them is Fernan Gomez de Cibdareal, who, if there ever were such a person, was the king’s physician, and, in some respects, his confidential and familiar friend. He was born, according to the Letters that pass under his name, about 1386,[670] and, though not of a distinguished family, had for his godfather Pedro Lopez de Ayala, the great chronicler and chancellor of Castile. When he was not yet four-and-twenty years old, John the Second being still a child, Cibdareal entered the royal service and remained attached to the king’s person till the death of his master, when we lose sight of him altogether. During this long period of above forty years, he maintained a correspondence, to which we have already alluded more than once, with many of the principal persons in the state; with the king himself, with several of the archbishops and bishops, and with a considerable number of noblemen and men of letters, among the last of whom were Alfonso de Cartagena and Juan de Mena. A part of this correspondence, amounting to one hundred and five letters, written between 1425 and 1454, has been published, in two editions; the first claiming to be of 1499, and the last prepared in 1775, with some care, by Amirola, the Secretary of the Spanish Academy of History. Most of the subjects discussed by the honest physician and courtier in these letters are still interesting; and some of them, like the death of the Constable, which he describes minutely to the Archbishop of Toledo, are important, if they can be trusted as genuine. In almost all he wrote, he shows the good-nature and good sense which preserved for him the favor of leading persons in the opposite factions of the time, and which, though he belonged to the party of the Constable, yet prevented him from being blind to that great man’s faults, or becoming involved in his fate. The tone of the correspondence is simple and natural, always quite Castilian, and sometimes very amusing; as, for instance, when he is repeating court gossip to the Grand Justiciary of Castile, or telling stories to Juan de Mena. But a very interesting letter to the Bishop of Orense, containing an account of John the Second’s death, will perhaps give a better idea of its author’s general spirit and manner, and, at the same time, exhibit somewhat of his personal character.

“I foresee very plainly,” he says to the Bishop, “that you will read with tears this letter, which I write to you in anguish. We are both become orphans; and so has all Spain. For the good and noble and just King John, our sovereign lord, is dead. And I, miserable man that I am,—who was not yet twenty-four years old when I entered his service with the Bachelor Arrevalo, and have, till I am now sixty-eight, lived in his palace, or, I might almost say, in his bed-chamber and next his bed, always in his confidence, and yet never thinking of myself,—I should now have but a poor pension of thirty thousand maravedís for my long service, if, just at his death, he had not ordered the government of Cibdareal to be given to my son, who I pray may be happier than his father has been. But, in truth, I had always thought to die before his Highness; whereas he died in my presence, on the eve of Saint Mary Magdalen, a blessed saint, whom he greatly resembled in sorrowing over his sins. It was a sharp fever that destroyed him. He was much wearied with travelling about hither and thither; and he had always the death of Don Alvaro de Luna before him, grieving about it secretly, and seeing that the nobles were never the more quiet for it, but, on the contrary, that the king of Navarre had persuaded the king of Portugal to think he had grounds of complaint concerning the wars in Barbary, and that the king had answered him with a crafty letter. All this wore his heart out. And so, travelling along from Avila to Medina, a paroxysm came upon him with a sharp fever, that seemed at first as if it would kill him straightway. And the Prior of Guadalupe sent directly for Prince Henry; for he was afraid some of the nobles would gather for the Infante Don Alfonso; but it pleased God that the king recovered his faculties by means of a medicine I gave him. And so he went on to Valladolid; but as soon as he entered the city, he was struck with death, as I said before the Bachelor Frias, who held it to be a small matter, and before the Bachelor Beteta, who held what I said to be an idle tale.... The consolation that remains to me is, that he died like a Christian king, faithful and loyal to his Maker. Three hours before he gave up the ghost, he said to me: ‘Bachelor Cibdareal, I ought to have been born the son of a tradesman, and then I should have been a friar of Abrojo, and not a king of Castile.’ And then he asked pardon of all about him, if he had done them any wrong; and bade me ask it for him of those of whom he could not ask it himself. I followed him to his grave in Saint Paul’s, and then came to this lonely room in the suburbs; for I am now so weary of life, that I do not think it will be a difficult matter to loosen me from it, much as men commonly fear death. Two days ago, I went to see the queen; but I found the palace from the top to the bottom so empty, that the house of the Admiral and that of Count Benevente are better served. King Henry keeps all King John’s servants; but I am too old to begin to follow another master about, and, if God so pleases, I shall go to Cibdareal with my son, where I hope the king will give me enough to die upon.” This is the last we hear of the sorrowing old man, who probably died soon after the date of this letter, which seems to have been written in July, 1454.[671]