We may therefore consider that the Spanish language at this period was not only formed, but that it had reached substantially its full proportions, and had received all its essential characteristics. Indeed, it had already for half a century been regularly cared for and cultivated. Alonso de Palencia, who had long been in the service of his country as an ambassador, and was afterwards its chronicler, published a Latin and Spanish Dictionary in 1490; the oldest in which a Castilian vocabulary is to be found.[876] This was succeeded, two years later, by the first Castilian Grammar, the work of Antonio de Lebrixa, who had before published a Latin Grammar in the Latin language, and translated it for the benefit, as he tells us, of the ladies of the court.[877] Other similar and equally successful attempts followed. A purely Spanish Dictionary by Lebrixa, the first of its kind, appeared in 1492, and a Dictionary for ecclesiastical purposes, in both Latin and Spanish, by Santa Ella, succeeded it in 1499; both often reprinted afterwards, and long regarded as standard authorities.[878] All these works, so important for the consolidation of the language, and so well constructed that successors to them were not found till above a century later,[879] were, it should be observed, produced under the direct and personal patronage of Queen Isabella, who in this, as in so many other ways, gave proof at once of her far-sightedness in affairs of state, and of her wise tastes and preferences in whatever regarded the intellectual cultivation of her subjects.[880]
The language thus formed was now fast spreading throughout the kingdom, and displacing dialects some of which, as old as itself, had seemed, at one period, destined to surpass it in cultivation and general prevalence. The ancient Galician, in which Alfonso the Wise was educated, and in which he sometimes wrote, was now known as a polite language only in Portugal, where it had risen to be so independent of the stock from which it sprang as almost to disavow its origin. The Valencian and Catalonian, those kindred dialects of the Provençal race, whose influences in the thirteenth century were felt through the whole Peninsula, claimed, at this period, something of their earlier dignity only below the last range of hills on the coast of the Mediterranean. The Biscayan alone, unchanged as the mountains which sheltered it, still preserved for itself the same separate character it had at the earliest dawnings of tradition,—a character which has continued essentially the same down to our own times.
But though the Castilian, advancing with the whole authority of the government, which at this time spoke to the people of all Spain in no other language, was heard and acknowledged throughout the country as the language of the state and of all political power, still the popular and local habits of four centuries could not be at once or entirely broken up. The Galician, the Valencian, and the Catalonian continued to be spoken in the age of Charles the Fifth, and are spoken now by the masses of the people in their respective provinces, and to some extent in the refined society of each. Even Andalusia and Aragon have not yet emancipated themselves completely from their original idioms; and in the same way, each of the other grand divisions of the country, several of which were at one time independent kingdoms, are still, like Estremadura and La Mancha, distinguished by peculiarities of phraseology and accent.[881]
Castile alone, and especially Old Castile, claims, as of inherited right, from the beginning of the fifteenth century, the prerogative of speaking absolutely pure Spanish. Villalobos, it is true, who was always a flatterer of royal authority, insisted that this prerogative followed the residences of the sovereign and the court;[882] but the better opinion has been, that the purest form of the Castilian must be sought at Toledo,—the Imperial Toledo, as it was called,—peculiarly favored when it was the political capital of the ancient monarchy in the time of the Goths, and consecrated anew as the ecclesiastical head of all Christian Spain, the moment it was rescued from the hands of the Moors.[883] It has even been said, that the supremacy of this venerable city in the purity of its dialect was so fully settled, from the first appearance of the language as the language of the state in the thirteenth century, that Alfonso the Wise, in a Cortes held there, directed the meaning of any disputed word to be settled by its use at Toledo.[884] But however this may be, there is no question, that, from the time of Charles the Fifth to the present day, the Toledan has been considered, on the whole, the normal form of the national language, and that, from the same period, the Castilian dialect, having vindicated for itself an absolute supremacy over all the other dialects of the monarchy, has been the only one recognized as the language of the classical poetry and prose of the whole country.
CHAPTER VI.
Chronicling Period gone by. — Charles the Fifth. — Guevara. — Ocampo. — Sepúlveda. — Mexia. — Accounts of the New World. — Cortés. — Gomara. — Bernal Diaz. — Oviedo. — Las Casas. — Vaca. — Xerez. — Çarate.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, it is obvious that the age for chronicles had gone by in Spain. Still it was thought for the dignity of the monarchy that the stately forms of the elder time should, in this as in other particulars, be kept up by public authority. Charles the Fifth, therefore, as if his ambitious projects as a conqueror were to find their counterpart in his arrangements for recording their success, had several authorized chroniclers, all men of consideration and learning. But the shadow on the dial would not go back at the royal command. The greatest monarch of his time could appoint chroniclers, but he could not give them the spirit of an age that was past. The chronicles he demanded at their hands were either never undertaken or never finished. Antonio de Guevara, one of the persons to whom these duties were assigned, seems to have been singularly conscientious in the devotion of his time to them; for we are told, that, by his will, he ordered the salary of one year, during which he had written nothing of his task, to be returned to the Imperial treasury. This, however, did not imply that he was a successful chronicler.[885] What he wrote was not thought worthy of being published by his contemporaries, and would probably be judged no more favorably by the present generation, unless it discovered a greater regard for historical truth, and a better style, than are found in his discussions on the life and character of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.[886]
Florian de Ocampo, another of the more distinguished of the chroniclers, showed a wide ambition in the plan he proposed to himself; beginning his chronicles of Charles the Fifth as far back as the days of Noah’s flood. As might have been foreseen, he lived only so long as to finish a small fragment of his vast undertaking;—hardly a quarter part of the first of its four grand divisions.[887] But he went far enough to show how completely the age for such writing was passed away.[888] Not that he failed in credulity; for of that he had more than enough. It was not, however, the poetical credulity of his predecessors, trusting to the old national traditions, but an easy faith, that believed in the wearisome forgeries called the works of Berosus and Manetho,[889] which had been discredited from their first appearance half a century before, and yet were now used by Ocampo as if they were the probable, if not the sufficient, records of an uninterrupted succession of Spanish kings from Tubal, a grandson of Noah. Such a credulity has no charm about it. But besides this, the work of Ocampo, in its very structure, is dry and absurd; and, being written in a formal and heavy style, it is all but impossible to read it. He died in 1555, the year the Emperor abdicated, leaving us little occasion to regret that he had brought his annals of Spain no lower down than the age of the Scipios.
Juan Ginez de Sepúlveda was also charged by the Emperor fitly to record the events of his reign;[890] and so was Pero Mexia;[891] but the history of the former, which was first published by the Academy in 1780, is in Latin, while that of Mexia, written, apparently, after 1545, and coming down to the coronation at Bologna, was never published at all.[892] A larger history, however, by the last author, consisting of the lives of all the Roman emperors from Julius Cæsar to Maximilian of Austria, the predecessor of Charles the Fifth, which was printed several times, and is spoken of as an introduction to his Chronicle, shows, notwithstanding its many imperfections of style, that his purpose was to write a true and well-digested history, since he generally refers, under each reign, to the authorities on which he relies.[893]