History of Spanish Literature, vol. 2 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

In the course of the next four years after the appearance of this rhymed chronicle of Leon, we find no less than three other long poems connected with the national history: one by Miguel Giner, on the siege of Antwerp by Alexander Farnese, who succeeded the unfortunate Don John of Austria as generalissimo of Philip the Second in the war of the Netherlands;—another, in twenty-one cantos, by Edward or Duarte Diaz, a Portuguese, on the taking of Granada by the Catholic sovereigns;—and the third by Lorenzo de Zamora, on the history of Saguntum and of its siege by Hannibal, in which, preserving the outline of that early story so far as it was well settled, he has wildly mixed up love-scenes, tournaments, and adventures, suited only to the age of chivalry. Taken together, they show how strong was the passion for narrative verse in Spain, where, in so short a time, it produced three such poems.[833]

To a similar result we should arrive from the single example of Christóval de Mesa, who, between 1594 and 1612, published three more national heroic poems;—the first on the tradition, that the body of Saint James, after his martyrdom at Jerusalem, was miraculously carried to Spain and deposited at Compostella, where that saint has ever since been worshipped as the especial patron of the whole kingdom;—the second on Pelayo and the recovery of Spain from the Moors down to the battle of Covadonga;—and the third on the battle of Tolosa, which broke the power of Mohammedanism and made sure the emancipation of the whole Peninsula. All three, as well as Mesa’s elaborate translations of the Æneid and Georgics, which followed them, are written in ottava rima, and all three are dedicated to Philip the Third.

Of their author we know little, and that little is told chiefly by himself in his pleasant poetical epistles, and especially in two addressed to the Count of Lemos and one to the Count de Castro. From these we learn, that, in his youth, he was addicted to the study of Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Soto, as well as to the teachings of Sanchez, the first Spanish scholar of his time; but that, later, he lived five years in Italy, much connected with Tasso, and from this time belonged entirely to the Italian school of Spanish poetry, to which, as his works show, he had always been inclined. But, with all his efforts,—and they were not few,—he found little favor or patronage. The Count de Lemos refused to carry him to Naples as a part of his poetical court, and the king took no notice of his long poems, which, indeed, were no more worthy of favor than the rest of their class that were then jostling and crowding one another in their efforts to obtain the royal protection.[834]

Juan de la Cueva followed in the footsteps of Mesa. His “Bética,” printed in 1603, is an heroic poem, in twenty-four cantos, on the conquest of Seville by Saint Ferdinand. Its subject is good, and its hero, who is the king himself, is no less so. But the poem is a failure; heavy and uninteresting in its plan, and cold in its execution;—for Cueva, who took his materials chiefly from the General Chronicle of Saint Ferdinand’s son, was not able to mould them, as he strove to do, into the form of the “Jerusalem Delivered.” The task was, in fact, quite beyond his power. The most agreeable portion of his work is that which involves the character of Tarfira, a personage imitated from Tasso’s Clorinda; but, after all, the romantic episode of which she is the heroine has great defects, and is too much interwoven with the principal thread of the story. The general plan of the poem, however, is less encumbered in its movement and more epic in its structure than is common in those of its class in Spanish literature; and the versification, though careless, is fluent and generally harmonious.[835]

A physician and scholar of Valladolid, Alfonso Lopez,—commonly called El Pinciano, from the Roman name of his native city,—wrote in his youth a poem on the subject of Pelayo, but did not publish it till 1605, when he was already an old man. It supposes Pelayo to have been misled by a dream from Lucifer to undertake a journey to Jerusalem, and, when at the Holy Sepulchre, to have been undeceived by another dream, and sent back for the emancipation of his country. This last is the obvious and real subject of the poem, which has episodes and machinery enough to explain all the history of Spain down to the time of Philip the Third, to whom the “Pelayo” is dedicated. It is long, like the rest of its class, and, though ushered into notice with an air of much scholarship and pretension, it is written with little skill in the versification, and is one of the most wearisome poems in the language.[836]

In 1612 two more similar epics were published. The first is “La Numantina,” which is on the siege of Numantia and the history of Soria, a town standing in the neighbourhood of Numantia, and claiming to be its successor. The author, Francisco Mosquera de Barnuevo, who belonged to an ancient and distinguished family there, not only wrote this poem of fifteen cantos in honor of the territory where he was born, but accompanied it with a prose history, as a sort of running commentary, in which whatever relates to Soria, and especially the Barnuevos, is not forgotten. It is throughout a very solemn piece of pedantry, and its metaphysical agencies, such as Europe talking to Nemesis, and Antiquity teaching the author, seem to be a good deal in the tone of the old Mysteries, and are certainly any thing but poetical. The other epic referred to is by Vasconcellos, a Portuguese, who had an important command and fought bravely against Spain when his country was emancipating itself from the Spanish yoke, but still wrote with purity, in the Castilian, seventeen cantos, nominally on the expulsion of the Moriscos, but really on the history of the whole Peninsula, from the time of the first entrance of the Moors down to the final exile of the last of their hated descendants by Philip the Third. But neither of these poems is now remembered, and neither deserves to be.[837]

From this point of time, such narrative poems, more or less approaching an epic form, and devoted to the glory of Spain, become rare;—a circumstance to be, in part, attributed to the success of Lope de Vega, which gave to the national drama a prominence so brilliant. Still, in the course of the next thirty years, two or three attempts were made that should be noticed.

The first of them is by a Portuguese lady, Bernarda Ferreira, and is called “Spain Emancipated”; a tedious poem, in two parts, the earlier of which appeared in 1618, and the latter in 1673, long after its author’s death. It is, in fact, a rhymed chronicle,—to the first part of which the dates are regularly attached,—and was intended, no doubt, to cover the whole seven centuries of Spanish history from the outbreak of Pelayo to the fall of Granada, but it is finished no farther than the reign of Alfonso the Wise, where it stops abruptly.

The second attempt is one of the most absurd known in literary history. It was made by Vera y Figueroa, Count de la Roca, long the minister of Spain at Venice, and the author of a pleasant prose treatise on the Rights and Duties of an Ambassador. He began by translating Tasso’s “Jerusalem Delivered,” but, just as his version was ready to be published, he changed his purpose, and accommodated the whole work—history, poetical ornaments, and all—to the delivery of Seville from the Moors by Saint Ferdinand. The transformation is as complete as any in Ovid, but certainly not as graceful;—a fact singularly apparent in the second book, where Tasso’s beautiful and touching story of Sophronia and Olindo is travestied by the corresponding one of Leocadia and Galindo. As if to make the whole more grotesque and give it the air of a grave caricature, the Spanish poem is composed throughout in the old Castilian redondillas, and carried through exactly twenty books, all running parallel to the twenty of the “Jerusalem Delivered.”

The last of the three attempts just referred to, and the last one of the period that needs to be noticed, is the “Naples Recovered” of Prince Esquilache, which, though written earlier, dates, by its publication, from 1651. It is on the conquest of Naples in the middle of the fifteenth century by Alfonso the Fifth of Aragon, who seems to have been selected as its hero, in part, at least, because the Prince of Esquilache could boast his descent from that truly great monarch.