I must live. What a life must it be![724]
Akin to the Invenciones were the “Motes con sus Glosas”; mottoes or short apophthegms, which we find here to the number of above forty, each accompanied by a heavy, rhymed gloss. The mottoes themselves are generally proverbs, and have a national and sometimes a spirited air. Thus, the lady Catalina Manrique took “Never mickle cost but little,” referring to the difficulty of obtaining her regard, to which Cartagena answered, with another proverb, “Merit pays all,” and then explained or mystified both with a tedious gloss. The rest are not better, and all were valued, at the time they were composed, for precisely what now seems most worthless in them.[725]
The “Villancicos” that follow—songs in the old Spanish measure, with a refrain and occasionally short verses broken in—are more agreeable, and sometimes are not without merit. They received their name from their rustic character, and were believed to have been first composed by the villanos, or peasants, for the Nativity and other festivals of the Church. Imitations of these rude roundelays are found, as we have seen, in Juan de la Enzina, and occur in a multitude of poets since; but the fifty-four in the Cancionero, many of which bear the names of leading poets in the preceding century, are too courtly in their tone, and approach the character of the Canciones.[726] In other respects, they remind us of the earliest French madrigals, or, still more, of the Provençal poems, that are nearly in the same measures.[727]
The last division of this conceited kind of poetry collected into the first Cancioneros Generales is that called “Preguntas,” or Questions; more properly, Questions and Answers; since it is merely a series of riddles, with their solutions in verse. Childish as such trifles may seem now, they were admired in the fifteenth century. Baena, in the Preface to his collection, mentions them among its most considerable attractions; and the series here given, consisting of fifty-five, begins with such authors as the Marquis of Santillana and Juan de Mena, and ends with Garci Sanchez de Badajoz, and other poets of note who lived in the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Probably it was an easy exercise of the wits in extemporaneous verse practised at the court of John the Second, as we find it practised, above a century later, by the shepherds in the “Galatea” of Cervantes.[728] But the specimens of it in the Cancioneros are painfully constrained; the answers being required to correspond in every particular of measure, number, and the succession of rhymes with those of the precedent question. On the other hand, the riddles themselves are sometimes very simple, and sometimes very familiar; Juan de Mena, for instance, gravely proposing that of the Sphinx of Œdipus to the Marquis of Santillana, as if it were possible the Marquis had never before heard of it.[729]
Thus far the contents of the Cancionero General date from the fifteenth century, and chiefly from the middle and latter part of it. Subsequently, we have a series of poets who belong rather to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, such as Puerto Carrero, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Don Juan Manuel of Portugal, Heredia, and a few others; after which follows, in the early editions, a collection of what are called “Jests provoking Laughter,”—really, a number of very gross poems which constitute part of an indecent Cancionero printed separately at Valencia, several years afterwards, but which were soon excluded from the editions of the Cancionero General, where a few trifles, sometimes in the Valencian dialect, are inserted, to fill up the space they had occupied.[730] The air of this second grand division of the collection is, however, like the air of that which precedes it, and the poetical merit is less. At last, near the conclusion of the editions of 1557 and 1573, we meet with compositions belonging to the time of Charles the Fifth, among which are two by Boscan, a few in the Italian language, and still more in the Italian manner; all indicating a new state of things, and a new development of the forms of Spanish poetry.[731]
But this change belongs to another period of the literature of Castile, before entering on which we must notice a few circumstances in the Cancioneros characteristic of the one we have just gone over. And here the first thing that strikes us is the large number of persons whose verses are thus collected. In that of 1535, which may be taken as the average of the whole series, there are not less than a hundred and twenty. But out of this multitude, the number really claiming any careful notice is small. Many persons appear only as the contributors of single trifles, such as a device or a cancion, and sometimes, probably, never wrote even these. Others contributed only two or three short poems, which their social position, rather than their taste or talents, led them to adventure. So that the number of those appearing in the proper character of authors in the Cancionero General is only about forty, and of these not more than four or five deserve to be remembered.
But the rank and personal consideration of those that throng it are, perhaps, more remarkable than their number, and certainly more so than their merit. John the Second is there, and Prince Henry, afterwards Henry the Fourth; the Constable Alvaro de Luna,[732] the Count Haro, and the Count of Plasencia; the Dukes of Alva, Albuquerque, and Medina Sidonia; the Count of Tendilla and Don Juan Manuel; the Marquises of Santillana, Astorga, and Villa Franca; the Viscount Altamira, and other leading personages of their time; so that, as Lope de Vega once said, “most of the poets of that age were great lords, admirals, constables, dukes, counts, and kings”;[733] or, in other words, verse-writing was a fashion at the court of Castile in the fifteenth century.
This, in fact, is the character that is indelibly impressed on the collections found in the old Cancioneros Generales. Of the earliest poetry of the country, such as it is found in the legend of the Cid, in Berceo, and in the Archpriest of Hita, they afford not a trace; and if a few ballads are inserted, it is for the sake of the poor glosses with which they are encumbered. But the Provençal spirit of the Troubadours is everywhere present, if not everywhere strongly marked; and occasionally we find imitations of the earlier Italian school of Dante and his immediate followers, which are more apparent than successful. The mass is wearisome and monotonous. Nearly every one of the longer poems contained in it is composed in lines of eight syllables, divided into redondillas, almost always easy in their movement, but rarely graceful; sometimes broken by a regularly recurring verse of only four or five syllables, and hence called quebrado, but more frequently arranged in stanzas of eight or ten uniform lines. It is nearly all amatory, and the amatory portions are nearly all metaphysical and affected. It is of the court, courtly; overstrained, formal, and cold. What is not written by persons of rank is written for their pleasure; and though the spirit of a chivalrous age is thus sometimes brought out, yet what is best in that spirit is concealed by a prevalent desire to fall in with the superficial fashions and fantastic fancies that at last destroyed it.
But it was impossible such a wearisome state of poetical culture should become permanent in a country so full of stirring interests as Spain was in the age that followed the fall of Granada and the discovery of America. Poetry, or at least the love of poetry, made progress with the great advancement of the nation under Ferdinand and Isabella; though the taste of the court in whatever regarded Spanish literature continued low and false. Other circumstances, too, favored the great and beneficial change that was everywhere becoming apparent. The language of Castile had already asserted its supremacy, and, with the old Castilian spirit and cultivation, it was spreading into Andalusia and Aragon, and planting itself amidst the ruins of the Moorish power on the shores of the Mediterranean. Chronicle-writing was become frequent, and had begun to take the forms of regular history. The drama was advanced as far as the “Celestina” in prose, and the more strictly scenic efforts of Torres Naharro in verse. Romance-writing was at the height of its success. And the old ballad spirit—the true foundation of Spanish poetry—had received a new impulse and richer materials from the contests in which all Christian Spain had borne a part amidst the mountains of Granada, and from the wild tales of the feuds and adventures of rival factions within the walls of that devoted city. Every thing, indeed, announced a decided movement in the literature of the nation, and almost every thing seemed to favor and facilitate it.