Garcilasso’s versification is uncommonly sweet, and well suited to the tender and sad character of his poetry. In his second Eclogue, he has tried the singular experiment of making the rhyme often, not between the ends of two lines, but between the end of one and the middle of the next. It was not, however, successful. Cervantes has imitated it, and so have one or two others; but wherever the rhyme is quite obvious, the effect is not good, and where it is little noticed, the lines take rather the character of blank verse.[785] In general, however, Garcilasso’s harmony can hardly be improved; at least, not without injuring his versification in particulars yet more important.
His poems had a great success from the moment they appeared. There was a grace and an elegance about them of which Boscan may in part have set the example, but which Boscan was never able to reach. The Spaniards who came back from Rome and Naples were delighted to find at home what had so much charmed them in their campaigns and wanderings in Italy; and Garcilasso’s poems were proudly reprinted wherever the Spanish arms and influence extended. They received, too, other honors. In less than half a century from their first appearance, Francisco Sanchez, commonly called “El Brocense,” the most learned Spaniard of his age, added a commentary to them, which has still some value. A little later, Herrera, the lyric poet, published them, with a series of notes yet more ample, in which, amidst much that is useless, interesting details may be found, for which he was indebted to Puerto Carrero, the poet’s son-in-law. And early in the next century, Tamayo de Vargas again encumbered the whole with a new mass of unprofitable learning.[786] Such distinctions, however, constituted, even when they were fresh, little of Garcilasso’s real glory, which rested on the safer foundations of a genuine and general regard. His poetry, from the first, sunk deep into the hearts of his countrymen. His sonnets were heard everywhere; his eclogues were acted like popular dramas.[787] The greatest geniuses of his nation express for him a reverence they show to none of their predecessors. Lope de Vega imitates him in every possible way; Cervantes praises him more than he does any other poet, and cites him oftener.[788] And thus Garcilasso has come down to us enjoying a general national admiration, such as is given to hardly any other Spanish poet, and to none that lived before his time.
That it would have been better for himself and for the literature of his country, if he had drawn more from the elements of the earlier national character, and imitated less the great Italian masters he justly admired, can hardly be doubted. It would have given a freer and more generous movement to his poetical genius, and opened to him a range of subjects and forms of composition, from which, by rejecting the example of the national poets that had gone before him, he excluded himself.[789] But he deliberately decided otherwise; and his great success, added to that of Boscan, introduced into Spain an Italian school of poetry which has been an important part of Spanish literature ever since.[790]
CHAPTER III.
Imitations of the Italian Manner. — Acuña. — Cetina. — Opposition to it. — Castillejo. — Antonio de Villegas. — Silvestre. — Discussions concerning it. — Argote de Molina. — Montalvo. — Lope de Vega. — Its Final Success.
The example set by Boscan and Garcilasso was so well suited to the spirit and demands of the age, that it became as much a fashion, at the court of Charles the Fifth, to write in the Italian manner as it did to travel in Italy or make a military campaign there. Among those who earliest adopted the forms of Italian verse was Fernando de Acuña, a gentleman belonging to a noble Portuguese family, but born in Madrid and writing only in Spanish. He served in Flanders, in Italy, and in Africa; and after the conquest of Tunis, in 1535, a mutiny having occurred in its garrison, he was sent there by the Emperor, with unlimited authority to punish or to pardon those implicated in it; a difficult mission, whose duties he fulfilled with great discretion and with an honorable generosity.
In other respects, too, Acuña was treated with peculiar confidence. Charles the Fifth—as we learn from the familiar correspondence of Van Male, a poor scholar and gentleman who slept often in his bed-chamber and nursed him in his infirmities—amused the fretfulness of a premature old age, under which his proud spirit constantly chafed, by making a translation into Spanish prose of a French poem then much in vogue and favor,—the “Chevalier Délibéré.” Its author, Olivier de la Marche, was long attached to the service of Mary of Burgundy, the Emperor’s grandmother, and had made, in the Chevalier Délibéré, an allegorical show of the events in the life of her father, so flattering as to render his picture an object of general admiration at the time when Charles was educated at her brilliant court.[791] But the great Emperor, though his prose version of the pleasant reading of his youth is said to have been prepared with more skill and success than might have been anticipated from his imperfect training for such a task, felt that he was unable to give it the easy dress he desired it should wear in Castilian verse. This labor, therefore, in the plenitude of his authority, he assigned to Acuña; confiding to him the manuscript he had prepared in great secrecy, and requiring him to cast it into a more appropriate and agreeable form.
Acuña was well fitted for the delicate duty assigned to him. As a courtier, skilled in the humors of the palace, he omitted several passages that would be little interesting to his master, and inserted others that would be more so,—particularly several relating to Ferdinand and Isabella, and to Philip, Charles’s father. As a poet, he turned the Emperor’s prose into the old double quintillas with a purity and richness of idiom rare in any period of Spanish literature, and some portion of the merit of which has, perhaps justly, been attributed by Van Male to the Imperial version out of which it was constructed. The poem thus prepared—making three hundred and seventy-nine stanzas of ten short lines each—was then secretly given by Charles, as if it were a present worthy of a munificent sovereign, to Van Male, the poor servant, who records the facts relating to it, and then, forbidding all notice of himself in the Preface, the Emperor ordered an edition of it, so large, that the unhappy scholar trembled at the pecuniary risks he was to run on account of the bounty he had received. The “Cavallero Determinado,” as it was called in the version of Acuña, was, however, more successful than Van Male supposed it would be; and, partly from the interest the master of so many kingdoms must have felt in a work in which his secret share was considerable; partly from the ingenuity of the allegory, which is due in general to La Marche; and partly from the fluency and grace of the versification, which must be wholly Acuña’s, it became very popular; seven editions of it being called for in the course of half a century.[792]
But notwithstanding the success of the Cavallero Determinado, Acuña wrote hardly any thing else in the old national style and manner. His shorter poems, filling a small volume, are, with one or two inconsiderable exceptions, in the Italian measures, and sometimes are direct imitations of Boscan and Garcilasso. They are almost all written in good taste, and with a classical finish, especially “The Contest of Ajax with Ulysses,” where, in tolerable blank verse, Acuña has imitated the severe simplicity of Homer. He was known, too, in Italy, and his translation of a part of Boiardo’s “Orlando Innamorato” was praised there; but his miscellanies and his sonnets found more favor at home. He died at Granada, it is said, in 1580, while prosecuting a claim he had inherited to a Spanish title; but his poems were not printed till 1591, when, like those of Boscan, with which they may be fairly ranked, they were published by the pious care of his widow.[793]