Ercilla intimates that he soon discovered such a description of successive events to be monotonous; and he determined to intersperse it with incidents more interesting and poetical. In his second part, therefore, which was not printed till 1578, we have, it is true, the same historical fidelity in the main thread of the narrative, but it is broken with something like epic machinery; such as a vision of Bellona, in the seventeenth and eighteenth cantos, where the poet witnesses in South America the victory of Philip the Second at Saint Quentin, the day it was won in France;—the cave of the magician Fiton, in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth cantos, where he sees the battle of Lepanto, which happened long afterwards, fought by anticipation;—the romantic story of Tegualda in the twentieth, and that of Glaura in the twenty-fourth: so that, when we come to the end of the second part,—which concludes, again, with needless abruptness, we find that we have enjoyed more poetry than we had in the first, if we have made less rapid progress in the history.
In the third part, which appeared in 1590, we have again a continuation of the events of the war, though with episodes such as that in the thirty-second and thirty-third cantos,—which the poet strangely devotes to a defence, after the manner of the old Spanish chronicles, of the character of Queen Dido from the imputations cast on it by Virgil,—and that in the thirty-sixth, in which he pleasantly gives us much of what little we know concerning his own personal history.[797] In the thirty-seventh and last, he leaves all his previous subjects, and discusses the right of public and private war, and the claims of Philip the Second to the crown of Portugal; ending the whole poem, as far as he himself ended it, with touching complaints of his own miserable condition and disappointed hopes, and his determination to give the rest of his life to penitence and devotion.
This can hardly be called an epic. It is an historical poem, partly in the manner of Silius Italicus, yet seeking to imitate the sudden transitions and easy style of the Italian masters, and struggling awkwardly to incorporate with different parts of its structure some of the supernatural machinery of Homer and Virgil. But this is the unfortunate side of the work. In other respects Ercilla is more successful. His descriptive powers, except in relation to natural scenery, are remarkable, and, whether devoted to battles or to the wild manners of the unfortunate Indians, have not been exceeded by any other Spanish poet. His speeches, too, are often excellent, especially the remarkable one in the second canto, given to Colócolo, the eldest of the Caciques, where the poet has been willing to place himself in direct rivalship with the speech which Homer, under similar circumstances, has given to Ulysses in the first book of the Iliad.[798] And his characters, so far as the Araucan chiefs are concerned, are drawn with force and distinctness, and lead us to sympathize with the cause of the Indians rather than with that of the invading Spaniards. Besides all this, his genius and sensibility often break through, where we should least expect it, and his Castilian feelings and character still oftener; the whole poem being pervaded with that deep sense of loyalty which was always a chief ingredient in Spanish honor and heroism, and which, in Ercilla, seems never to have been chilled by the ingratitude of the master to whom he devoted his life, and to whose glory he consecrated this poem.[799]
The Araucana, though one third longer than the Iliad, is a fragment; but, as far as the war of Arauco is concerned, it was soon completed by the addition of two more parts, embracing thirty-three additional cantos,—the work of a poet by the name of Osorio, who published it in 1597. Of its author, a native of Leon, we know only that he describes himself to have been young when he wrote it, and that in 1598 he gave the world another poem, on the wars of the knights of Malta and the capture of Rhodes. His continuation of the Araucana was several times printed, but has long since ceased to be read. Its more interesting portions are those in which the poet relates, with apparent accuracy, many of the exploits of Ercilla among the Indians;—the more absurd are those in which, under the pretext of visions of Bellona, an account is given of the conquest of Oran by Cardinal Ximenes, and that of Peru by the Pizarros, neither of which has any thing to do with the main subject of the poem. Taken as a whole, it is nearly as dull and chronicling as any thing of its class that preceded it.[800]
But there is one difficulty about both parts of this poem, which must have been very obvious at the time. Neither shows any purpose of doing honor to the commander in the war of Arauco, who was yet a representative of the great Mendoza family, and a leading personage at the courts of Philip the Second and Philip the Third. Why Osorio should have passed him over so slightly is not apparent; but Ercilla was evidently offended by the punishment inflicted on him after the unfortunate tournament, and took this mode of expressing his displeasure.[801] A poet of Chili, therefore, Pedro de Oña, attempted, so far as Ercilla was concerned, to repair the wrong, and, in 1596, published his “Arauco Subjugated,” in nineteen cantos, which he devoted expressly to the honor of the neglected commander. Oña’s success was inconsiderable, but was quite as much as he deserved. His poem was once reprinted; but, though it contains sixteen thousand lines, it stops in the middle of the events it undertakes to record, and has never been finished. It contains consultations of the infernal powers, like those in Tasso, and a love-story, in imitation of the one in Ercilla; but it is mainly historical, and ends at last with an account of the capture of “that English pirate Richerte Aquines,”—no doubt Sir Richard Hawkins, who was taken in the Pacific in 1594, under circumstances not more unlike those which Oña describes than might be expected in a poetical version of them by a Spaniard.[802]
But as the marvellous discoveries of the conquerors of America continued to fill the world with their fame, and to claim at home no small part of the interest that had so long been given to the national achievements in the Moorish wars, it was natural that the greatest of all the adventurers, Hernando Cortés, should come in for his share of the poetical honors that were lavishly scattered on all sides. In fact, as early as 1588, Gabriel Lasso de la Vega, a young cavalier of Madrid, stirred up by the example of Ercilla, published a poem, entitled “The Valiant Cortés,” which six years later he enlarged and printed anew under the name of “La Mexicana”; and in 1599, Antonio de Saavedra, a native of Mexico, published his “Indian Pilgrim,” which contains a regular life of Cortés in above sixteen thousand lines, written, as the author assures us, on the ocean, and in seventy days. Both are mere chronicling histories; but the last is not without freshness and truth, from the circumstance that it was the work of one familiar with the scenes he describes, and with the manners of the unhappy race of men whose disastrous fate he records.[803]
In the same year with the “Valiant Cortés” appeared the first volume of the lives of some of the early discoverers and adventurers in America, by Juan de Castellanos, an ecclesiastic of Tunja in the kingdom of New Granada; but one who, like many others that entered the Church in their old age, had been a soldier in his youth, and had visited many of the countries, and shared in many of the battles, he describes. It begins with an account of Columbus, and ends, about 1560, with the expedition of Orsua and the crimes of Aguirre, which Humboldt has called the most dramatic episode in the history of the Spanish conquests, and of which Southey has made an interesting, though painful, story. Why no more of the poem of Castellanos was published does not appear. More was known to exist; and at last, the second and third parts were found, and, with the testimony of Ercilla to the truth of their narratives, were published in 1847, bringing their broken accounts of the Spanish conquests in America, and especially in that part of it since known as Colombia, down to about 1588. The whole, except the conclusion, is written in the Italian octave stanza, and extends to nearly ninety thousand lines, in pure, fluent Castilian, which soon afterwards became rare, but in a chronicling spirit, which, though it adds to its value as history, takes from it all the best characteristics of poetry.[804]
Other poems of the same general character followed. One on the discovery and settlement of La Plata is by Centenera, who shared in the trials and sufferings of the original conquest,—a long, dull poem, in twenty-eight cantos, full of credulity, and yet not without value as a record of what its author saw and learned in his wild adventures. It contains, in the earlier parts, much irrelevant matter concerning Peru, and is throughout a strange mixture of history and geography, ending with three cantos devoted to “Captain Thomas Candis, captain-general of the queen of England,”—in other words, Thomas Cavendish, half gentleman, half pirate, whose overthrow in Brazil, in 1592, Centenera thinks a sufficiently glorious catastrophe for his long poem.[805] Another similar work on an expedition into New Mexico was written by Gaspar de Villagra, a captain of infantry, who served in the adventures he describes, and published his account in 1610, after his return to Spain. But both belong to the domain of history rather than to that of poetry.[806]
No less characteristic of the national temper and genius than these historical and heroic poems were the long religious narratives in verse produced during the same period and later. To one of these—that of Coloma on “The Passion of Christ,” printed in 1576—we have already alluded. Another, “The Universal Redemption,” by Blasco, first printed in 1584, should also be mentioned. It fills fifty-six cantos, and contains nearly thirty thousand lines, embracing the history of man from the creation to the descent of the Holy Spirit, and reading in many parts like one of the old Mysteries.[807] A third poem, by Mata, not unlike the last, extends through two volumes, and is devoted to the glories of Saint Francis and five of his followers; a collection of legends in octave stanzas, put together without order or picturesqueness, the first of which sets forth the meek Saint Francis in the disguise of a knight-errant. None of the three has any value.[808]
The next in the list, as we descend, is one of the best of its class, if not the very best. It is the “Monserrate” of Virues, the dramatic and lyric poet, so much praised by Lope de Vega and Cervantes. The subject is taken from the legends of the Spanish Church in the ninth century. Garin, a hermit living on the desolate mountain of Monserrate, in Catalonia, is guilty of one of the grossest and most atrocious crimes of which human nature is capable. Remorse seizes him. He goes to Rome for absolution, and obtains it only on the most degrading conditions. His penitence, however, is sincere and complete. In proof of it, the person he has murdered is restored to life, and the Madonna, appearing on the wild mountain where the unhappy man had committed his crime, consecrates its deep solitudes by founding there the magnificent sanctuary which has ever since made the Monserrate holy ground to all devout Spaniards.