Nor did the connection between the two countries stop here. In 1527, Rome itself was, for a moment, added to the conquests of the Spanish crown, and the Pope became the prisoner of the Emperor, as the king of France had been before. In 1530, Charles appeared again in Italy, surrounded by a splendid Spanish court, and at the head of a military power that left no doubt of his mastery. He at once crushed the liberties of Florence and restored the aristocracy of the Medici. He made peace with the outraged Pope. By his wisdom and moderation, he confirmed his friendly relations with the other states of Italy; and, as the seal of all his successes, he caused himself, in the presence of whatever was most august in both countries, to be solemnly crowned King of Lombardy and Emperor of the Romans, by the same Pope whom, three years before, he had counted among his captives.[753] Such a state of things necessarily implied a most intimate connection between Spain and Italy; and this connection was maintained down to the abdication of the Emperor, in 1555, and, indeed, long afterwards.[754]
On the other hand, it should be remembered that Italy was now in a condition to act with all the power of a superior civilization and refinement on this large body of Spaniards, many of them the leading spirits of the Empire, who, by successive wars and negotiations, were thus kept for half a century travelling in Italy and living at Genoa, Milan, and Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. The age of Lorenzo de’ Medici was already past, leaving behind it the memorials of Poliziano, Boiardo, Pulci, and Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Leo the Tenth and Clement the Seventh was contemporary, and had brought with it the yet more prevalent influences of Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian, of Machiavelli, of Berni, of Ariosto, of Bembo, and of Sannazaro; the last of whom, it is not unworthy of notice, was himself a descendant of one of those very Spanish families whom the political interests of the two countries had originally carried to Naples. It was, therefore, when Rome and Naples, Florence and the North of Italy, were in the maturity of their glory, as seats of the arts and letters, that no small part of what was most noble and cultivated in Spain was led across the Alps and awakened to a perception of such forms and creations of genius and taste as had not been attempted beyond the Pyrenees, and such as could not fail to produce their full effect on minds excited, like those of the whole Spanish people, by the glorious results of their long struggle against the Moors, and their present magnificent successes both in America and Europe.
Visible traces of the influence of Italian literature might, therefore, from general causes, soon be looked for in the Spanish; but an accident brings them to our notice somewhat earlier, perhaps, than might have been anticipated. Juan Boscan, a patrician of Barcelona, was, as he himself tells us, devoted to poetry from his youth. The city to which he belonged had early been distinguished for the number of Provençal and Catalonian Troubadours who had flourished in it. But Boscan preferred to write in the Castilian; and his defection from his native dialect became, in some sort, the seal of its fate. His earlier efforts, a few of which remain to us, are in the style of the preceding century; but at last, when, from the most distinct accounts we can obtain, he was about twenty-five years old, and when, we are assured, he had been received at court, had served in the army, and had visited foreign countries, he was induced, by an accident, to attempt the proper Italian measures, as they were then practised.[755]
He became, at that period, acquainted with Andrea Navagiero, who was sent, in 1524, as ambassador from Venice to Charles the Fifth, and returned home in 1528, carrying with him a dry, but valuable, itinerary, which was afterwards published as an account of his travels. He was a man of learning and a poet, an orator and a statesman of no mean name.[756] While in Spain, he spent, during the year 1526, six months at Granada.[757] “Being with Navagiero there one day,” says Boscan, “and discoursing with him about matters of wit and letters, and especially about the different forms they take in different languages, he asked me why I did not make an experiment in Castilian of sonnets and the other forms of verse used by good Italian authors; and not only spoke to me of it thus slightly, but urged me much to do it. A few days afterwards, I set off for my own home; and whether it were the length and solitariness of the way I know not, but, turning over different things in my mind, I came often back upon what Navagiero had said to me. And thus I began to try this kind of verse. At first, I found it somewhat difficult; for it is of a very artful construction, and in many particulars different from ours. But afterwards it seemed to me,—perhaps from the love we naturally bear to what is our own,—that I began to succeed very well, and so I went on, little by little, with increasing zeal.”[758]
This account is interesting and important. It is rare that any one individual has been able to exercise such an influence on the literature of a foreign nation as was exercised by Navagiero. It is still more rare,—indeed, perhaps, wholly unknown, in any case where it may have occurred,—that the precise mode in which it was exercised can be so exactly explained. Boscan tells us not only what he did, but what led him to do it, and how he began his work, which we find him, from this moment, following up, till he devoted himself to it entirely, and wrote in all the favorite Italian measures and forms with boldness and success. He was resisted, but he tells us Garcilasso sustained him; and from this small beginning in a slight conversation with Navagiero at Granada, a new school was introduced into Spanish poetry, which has prevailed in it ever since, and materially influenced its character and destinies.
Boscan felt his success. This we can see from his own account of it. But he made little effort to press his example on others; for he was a man of fortune and consideration, who led a happy life with his family at Barcelona, and hardly cared for popular reputation or influence. Occasionally, we are told, he was seen at court; and at one period he had some charge of the education of that Duke of Alva whose name, in the next reign, became so formidable. But in general he preferred a life of retirement to any of the prizes offered to ambition.
Letters were his amusement. “In what I have written,” he says, “the mere writing was never my object; but rather to solace such faculties as I have, and to go less heavily through certain heavy passages of my life.”[759] The range of his studies, however, was wider than this remark might seem to imply, and wider than was common in Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, even among scholars. He translated a tragedy of Euripides, which was licensed to be published, but which never appeared in print, and is, no doubt, lost.[760] On the basis of the “Hero and Leander” of Musæus, and following the example of Bernardo Tasso, he wrote, in the versi sciolti, or blank verse, of the Italians, a tale nearly three thousand lines long, which may still be read with pleasure, for the gentle and sweet passages it contains.[761] And in general, throughout his poetry, he shows that he was familiar with the Greek and Latin classics, and imbued, to a considerable degree, with the spirit of antiquity.
His longest work was a translation of the Italian “Courtier” of Balthazar Castiglione,—the best book on good-breeding, as Dr. Johnson thought two centuries afterwards, that was ever written.[762] Boscan, however, frankly says, that he did not like the business of translating, which he regarded as “a low vanity, beseeming men of little knowledge”; but Garcilasso de la Vega had sent him a copy of the original soon after it was published, and he made this Spanish version of it, he tells us, “at his friend’s earnest request.”[763] Either or both of them may have known its author in the same way Boscan knew Navagiero; for Castiglione was sent as ambassador of Clement the Seventh to Spain in 1525, and remained there till his death, which happened at Toledo, in 1529.
But however this may have been, the Italian original of the Courtier was prepared for the press in Spain and first printed in 1528;[764] soon after which Boscan must have made his translation, though it did not appear till 1540. As a version, it does not profess to be very strict, for Boscan says he thought an exact fidelity to be unworthy of him;[765] but, as a Spanish composition, it is uncommonly flowing and easy. Garcilasso declares that it reads like an original work;[766] and Morales, the historian, says, “The Courtier discourseth not better in Italy, where he was born, than here in Spain, where Boscan hath exhibited him so admirably well.”[767] Perhaps nothing in Castilian prose, of an earlier date, is written in so classical and finished a style as this translation by Boscan.
With such occupations Boscan filled up his unostentatious life. He published nothing, or very little, and we have no single date to record concerning him. But, from the few facts that can be collected, it seems probable he was born before 1500, and we know that he died as early as 1543; for in that year his works were published at Barcelona, by his widow, under a license from the Emperor Charles the Fifth, with a Preface, in which she says her husband had partly prepared them for the press, because he feared they would be printed from some of the many imperfect copies that had gone into circulation without his consent.