The reigns of John the Second and of his children, Henry the Fourth and Isabella the Catholic, over which we have now passed, extend from 1407 to 1504, and therefore fill almost a complete century, though they comprise only two generations of sovereigns. Of the principal writers who flourished while they sat on the throne of Castile we have already spoken, whether they were chroniclers or dramatists, whether they were poets or prose-writers, whether they belonged to the Provençal school or to the Castilian. But, after all, a more distinct idea of the poetical culture of Spain during this century, than can be readily obtained in any other way, is to be gathered from the old Cancioneros; those ample magazines, filled almost entirely with the poetry of the age that preceded their formation.
Nothing, indeed, that belonged to the literature of the fifteenth century in Spain marks its character more plainly than these large and ill-digested collections. The oldest of them, to which we have more than once referred, was the work of Juan Alfonso de Baena, a converted Jew, and one of the secretaries of John the Second. It dates, from internal evidence, between the years 1449 and 1454, and was made, as the compiler tells us in his preface, chiefly to please the king, but also, as he adds, in the persuasion that it would not be disregarded by the queen, the heir-apparent, and the court and nobility in general. For this purpose, he says, he had brought together the works of all the Spanish poets who, in his own or any preceding age, had done honor to what he calls “the very gracious art of the Gaya Ciencia.”
On examining the Cancionero of Baena, however, we find that quite one third of the three hundred and eighty-four manuscript pages it fills are given to Villasandino,—who died about 1424, and whom Baena pronounces “the prince of all Spanish poets,”—and that nearly the whole of the remaining two thirds is divided among Diego de Valencia, Francisco Imperial, Baena himself, Fernan Perez de Guzman, and Ferrant Manuel de Lando; while the names of about fifty other persons, some of them reaching back to the reign of Henry the Third, are affixed to a multitude of short poems, of which, probably, they were not in all cases the authors. A little of it, like what is attributed to Macias, is in the Galician dialect; but by far the greater part was written by Castilians, who valued themselves upon their fashionable tone more than upon any thing else, and who, in obedience to the taste of their time, generally took the light and easy forms of Provençal verse, and as much of the Italian spirit as they comprehended and knew how to appropriate. Of poetry, except in some of the shorter pieces of Ferrant Lando, Alvarez Gato, and Perez de Guzman, the Cancionero of Baena contains hardly a trace.[706]
Many similar collections were made about the same time, enough of which remain to show that they were among the fashionable wants of the age, and that there was little variety in their character. Among them was the Cancionero in the Limousin dialect already mentioned;[707] that called Lope de Estuñiga’s, which comprises works of about forty authors;[708] that collected in 1464 by Fernan Martinez de Burgos; and no less than seven others, preserved in the National Library at Paris, all containing poetry of the middle and latter part of the fifteenth century, often the same authors, and sometimes the same poems, that are found in Baena and in Estuñiga.[709] They all belong to a state of society in which the great nobility, imitating the king, maintained poetical courts about them, such as that of the Marquis of Villena at Barcelona, or the more brilliant one, perhaps, of the Duke Fadrique de Castro, who had constantly in his household Puerto Carrero, Gayoso, Manuel de Lando, and others then accounted great poets. That the prevailing tone of all this was Provençal we cannot doubt; but that it was somewhat influenced by a knowledge of the Italian we know from many of the poems that have been published, and from the intimations of the Marquis of Santillana in his letter to the Constable of Portugal.[710]
Thus far, more had been done in collecting the poetry of the time than might have been anticipated from the troubled state of public affairs; but it had been done only in one direction, and even in that with little judgment. The king and the more powerful of the nobility might indulge in the luxury of such Cancioneros and such poetical courts, but a general poetical culture could not be expected to follow influences so partial and inadequate. A new order of things, however, soon arose. In 1474, the art of printing was fairly established in Spain; and it is a striking fact, that the first book ascertained to have come from the Spanish press is a collection of poems recited that year by forty different poets contending for a public prize.[711] No doubt, such a volume was not compiled on the principle of the elder manuscript Cancioneros. Still, in some respects, it resembles them, and in others seems to have been the result of their example. But however this may be, a collection of poetry was printed at Saragossa, in 1492, containing the works of nine authors, among whom were Juan de Mena, the younger Manrique, and Fernan Perez de Guzman; the whole evidently made on the same principle and for the same purpose as the Cancioneros of Baena and Estuñiga, and dedicated to Queen Isabella, as the great patroness of whatever tended to the advancement of letters.[712]
It was a remarkable book to appear within eighteen years after the introduction of printing into Spain, when little but the most worthless Latin treatises had come from the national press; but it was far from containing all the Spanish poetry that was soon demanded. In 1511, therefore, Fernando del Castillo printed at Valencia what he called a “Cancionero General,” or General Collection of Poetry; the first book to which this well-known title was ever given. It professes to contain “many and divers works of all or of the most notable Troubadours of Spain, the ancient as well as the modern, in devotion, in morality, in love, in jests, ballads, villancicos, songs, devices, mottoes, glosses, questions, and answers.” It, in fact, contains poems attributed to about a hundred different persons, from the time of the Marquis of Santillana down to the period in which it was made; most of the separate pieces being placed under the names of those who were their authors, or were assumed to be so, while the rest are collected under the respective titles or divisions just enumerated, which then constituted the favorite subjects and forms of verse at court. Of proper order or arrangement, of critical judgment, or tasteful selection, there seems to have been little thought.
The work, however, was successful. In 1514, a new edition of it appeared; and before 1540, six others had followed, at Toledo and Seville, making, when taken together, eight in less than thirty years; a number which, if the peculiar nature and large size of the work are considered, can hardly find its parallel, at the same period, in any other European literature. Later,—in 1557 and 1573,—yet two other editions, somewhat enlarged, appeared at Antwerp, whither the inherited rights and military power of Charles the Fifth had carried a familiar knowledge of the Spanish language and a love for its cultivation. In each of the ten editions of this remarkable book, it should be borne in mind, that we may look for the body of poetry most in favor at court and in the more refined society of Spain during the whole of the fifteenth century and the early part of the sixteenth; the last and amplest of them comprising the names of one hundred and thirty-six authors, some of whom go back to the beginning of the reign of John the Second, while others come down to the time of the Emperor Charles the Fifth.[713]
Taking this Cancionero, then, as a true poetical representative of the period it embraces, the first thing we observe, on opening it, is a mass of devotional verse, evidently intended as a vestibule to conciliate favor for the more secular and free portions that follow. But it is itself very poor and gross; so poor and so gross, that we can hardly understand how, at any period, it can have been deemed religious. Indeed, within a century from the time when the Cancionero was published, this part of it was already become so offensive to the Church it had originally served to propitiate, that the whole of it was cut out of such printed copies as came within the reach of the ecclesiastical powers.[714]
There can be no doubt, however, about the devotional purposes for which it was first destined; some of the separate compositions being by the Marquis of Santillana, Fernan Perez de Guzman, and other well-known authors of the fifteenth century, who thus intended to give an odor of sanctity to their works and lives. A few poems in this division of the Cancionero, as well as a few scattered in other parts of it, are in the Limousin dialect; a circumstance which is probably to be attributed to the fact, that the whole was first collected and published in Valencia. But nothing in this portion can be accounted truly poetical, and very little of it religious. The best of its shorter poems is, perhaps, the following address of Mossen Juan Tallante to a figure of the Saviour expiring on the cross:—
O God! the infinitely great,