On whatever side we regard the character of Mendoza, we feel sure that he was an extraordinary man; but the combination of his powers is, after all, what is most to be wondered at. In all of them, however, and especially in the union of a life of military adventure and active interest in affairs with a sincere love of learning and elegant letters, he showed himself to be a genuine Spaniard;—the elements of greatness which his various fortunes had thus unfolded within him being all among the elements of Spanish national poetry and eloquence, in their best age and most generous development. The loyal old knight, therefore, may well stand forward with those who, first in the order of time, as well as of merit, are to constitute that final school of Spanish literature which was built on the safe foundations of the national genius and character, and can, therefore, never be shaken by the floods or convulsions of the ages that may come after it.
CHAPTER V.
Didactic Poetry. — Luis de Escobar. — Corelas. — Torre. — Didactic Prose. — Villalobos. — Oliva. — Sedeño. — Salazar. — Luis Mexia. — Pedro Mexia. — Navarra. — Urrea. — Palacios Rubios. — Vanegas. — Juan de Avila. — Antonio de Guevara. — Diálogo de las Lenguas. — Progress of the Castilian from the Time of John the Second to that of the Emperor Charles the Fifth.
While an Italian spirit, or, at least, an observance of Italian forms, was beginning so decidedly to prevail in Spanish lyric and pastoral poetry, what was didactic, whether in prose or verse, took directions somewhat different.
In didactic poetry, among other forms, the old one of question and answer, known from the age of Juan de Mena, and found in the Cancioneros as late as Badajoz, continued to enjoy much favor. Originally, such questions seem to have been riddles and witticisms; but in the sixteenth century they gradually assumed a graver character, and at last claimed to be directly and absolutely didactic, constituting a form in which two remarkable books of light and easy verse were produced. The first of these books is called “The Four Hundred Answers to as many Questions of the Illustrious Don Fadrique Enriquez, the Admiral of Castile, and other Persons.” It was printed three times in 1545, the year in which it first appeared, and had undoubtedly a great success in the class of society to which it was addressed, and whose manners and opinions it strikingly illustrates. It contains at least twenty thousand verses, and was followed, in 1552, by another similar volume, partly in prose, and promising a third, which, however, was never published. Except five hundred proverbs, as they are inappropriately called, at the end of the first volume, and fifty glosses at the end of the second, the whole consists of such ingenious questions as a distinguished old nobleman in the reign of Charles the Fifth and his friends might imagine it would amuse or instruct them to have solved. They are on subjects as various as possible,—religion, morals, history, medicine, magic,—in short, whatever could occur to idle and curious minds; but they were all sent to an acute, good-humored Minorite friar, Luis de Escobar, who, being bed-ridden with the gout and other grievous maladies, had nothing better to do than to answer them.
His answers form the body of the work. Some of them are wise and some foolish, some are learned and some absurd; but they all bear the impression of their age. Once we have a long letter of advice about a godly life, sent to the Admiral, which, no doubt, was well suited to his case; and repeatedly we get complaints from the old monk himself of his sufferings, and accounts of what he was doing; so that from different parts of the two volumes it would be possible to collect a tolerably distinct picture of the amusements of society, if not its occupations, about the court, at the period when they were written. The poetry is in many respects not unlike that of Tusser, who was contemporary with Escobar, but it is better and more spirited.[830]
The second book of questions and answers to which we have referred is graver than the first. It was printed the next year after the great success of Escobar’s work, and is called “Three Hundred Questions concerning Natural Subjects, with their Answers,” by Alonso Lopez de Corelas, a physician, who had more learning, perhaps, than the monk he imitated, but is less amusing, and writes in verses neither so well constructed nor so agreeable.[831]
Others followed, like Gonzalez de la Torre, who in 1590 dedicated to the heir-apparent of the Spanish throne a volume of such dull religious riddles as were admired a century before.[832] But nobody, who wrote in this peculiar didactic style of verse, equalled Escobar, and it soon passed out of general notice and regard.[833]
In prose, about the same time, a fashion appeared of imitating the Roman didactic prose-writers, just as those writers had been imitated by Castiglione, Bembo, Giovanni della Casa, and others in Italy. The impulse seems plainly to have been communicated to Spain by the moderns, and not by the ancients. It was because the Italians led the way that the Romans were imitated, and not because the example of Cicero and Seneca had, of itself, been able to form a prose school, of any kind, beyond the Pyrenees.[834] The fashion was not one of so much importance and influence as that introduced into the poetry of the nation; but it is worthy of notice, both on account of its results during the reign of Charles the Fifth, and on account of an effect more or less distinct which it had on the prose style of the nation afterwards.