The poem, however, is little worthy of its subject. The author avowedly took great pains that it should have no more books than the Æneid; that it should violate no historical proprieties; and that, in its episodes, machinery, and style, as well as in its general fable and structure, it should be rigorously conformed to the safest epic models. He even, as he declares, had procured for it the crowning grace of a royal approbation before he ventured to give it to the world. Still it is a failure. It seems to foreshadow some of the severe and impoverishing doctrines of the next century of Spanish literature, and is written with a squeamish nicety in the versification that still further impairs its spirit; so that the last of the class to which it belongs, if it be not one of the most extravagant, is one of the most dull and uninteresting.[838]
It is worth while, as we finish our notice of this remarkable series of Spanish narrative and heroic poems, to recollect how long the passion for them continued in Spain, and how distinctly they retained to the last those ambitious feelings of national greatness which originally gave them birth. For a century, during the reigns of Philip the Second, Philip the Third, and Philip the Fourth, they were continually issuing from the press, and were continually received with the same kind, if not the same degree, of favor that had accompanied the old romances of chivalry, which they had helped to supersede. Nor was this unnatural, though it was extravagant. These old epic attempts were, in general, founded on some of the deepest and noblest traits in the Castilian character; and if that character had gone on rising in dignity and developing itself under the three Philips, as it had under Ferdinand and Isabella, there can be little doubt that the poetry built upon it would have taken rank by the side of that produced under similar impulses in Italy and England. But, unhappily, this was not the case. These Spanish narrative poems devoted to the glory of their country were produced when the national character was on the decline; and as they sprang more directly from the essential elements of that character, and depended more on its spirit, than did the similar poetry of any other people in modern times, so they now more visibly declined with it.
It is in vain, therefore, that the semblance of the feelings which originally gave them birth is continued till the last; for the substance is wanting. We mark, it is true, in nearly every one of them, a proud patriotism, which is just as presumptuous and exclusive under the weakest of the Philips as it was when Charles the Fifth wore half the crowns of Europe; but we feel that it is degenerating into a dreary, ungracious prejudice in favor of their own country, which prevented its poets from looking abroad into the world beyond the Pyrenees, where they could only see their cherished hopes of universal empire disappointed, and other nations rising to the state and power their own was so fast losing. We mark, too, throughout these epic attempts, the indications to which we have been accustomed of what was most peculiar in Spanish loyalty,—bold, turbulent, and encroaching against all other authority exactly in proportion as it was faithful and submissive to the highest; but we find it is now become a loyalty which, largely as it may share the spirit of military glory, has lost much of the sensitiveness of its ancient honor. And finally, though we mark in nearly every one of them that deep feeling of reverence for religion which had come down from the ages of contest with the infidel power of the Moors, yet we find it now constantly mingling the arrogant fierceness of worldly passion with the holiest of its offerings, and submitting, in the spirit of blind faith and devotion, to a bigotry whose decrees were written in blood. These multitudinous Spanish heroic poems, therefore, that were produced out of the elements of the national character when that character was falling into decay, naturally bear the marks of their origin. Instead of reaching, by the fervid enthusiasm of a true patriotism, of a proud loyalty, and of an enlightened religion, the elevation to which they aspire, they sink away, with few exceptions, into tedious, rhyming chronicles, in which the national glory fails to excite the interest that would belong to an earnest narrative of real events, without gaining in its stead any thing from the inspirations of poetical genius.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Lyric Poetry. — Its Condition from the Time of Boscan and Garcilasso de la Vega. — Cantorál, Figueroa, Espinel, Montemayor, Barahona de Soto, Rufo, Damian de Vegas, Padilla, Maldonado, Luis de Leon, Fernando de Herrera and his Poetical Language, Espinosa’s Collection, Manoel de Portugal, Mesa, Ledesma and the Conceptistas. — Cultismo, and similar Bad Taste in other Countries. — Góngora and his Followers, Villamediana, Paravicino, Roca y Serna, Antonio de Vega, Pantaleon, Violante del Cielo, Melo, Moncayo, La Torre, Vergara, Rozas, Ulloa, Salazar. — Fashion and Prevalence of the School of Góngora. — Efforts to overturn it by Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and others. — Medrano, Alcazar, Arguijo, Balvas.
A decidedly lyric tendency is perceptible in Spanish literature from the first. The ballads are full of it, and occasionally we find snatches of songs that seem almost as old as the earliest ballads. All this, of course, belongs to a period so remote and rude, that what it produced was national, because Spain had as yet no intercourse with other European countries that drew after it any of their culture and refinement. Later, we have seen how the neighbouring Provençal sometimes gave its measures and tones to the Castilian; and how both, so far as Spain was concerned, were fashioned by the tastes of the different courts of the country down to the time of Ferdinand and Isabella.
But, from the next age, which was that of Boscan and Garcilasso, a new element was introduced into Spanish lyric poetry; for, from that period, not only the forms, but the genius, of the more cultivated Italian are perceptible, in a manner that does not permit us for a moment to question their great influence and final success. Still, the difference between the characters of the two nations was so great, that the poetry of Spain could not be drawn into such relations with the Italian models set before it as was at first attempted. Two currents, therefore, were at once formed; and after the first encounter between them, in which Castillejo was the most prominent, if not the earliest, of those who strove to prevent their union, the respective streams have continued to flow on, side by side, but still separate from each other, down to our own days.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the influence of such poetry as had filled the Cancioneros from the time of John the Second was still acknowledged, and Bibero Costana, Heredia, Sanchez de Badajoz, and their contemporaries, continued to be read, though they no longer enjoyed the fashionable admiration which had once waited on them. But the change that was destined to overthrow the school to which these poets belonged was rapidly advancing; and if it were not the most favorable that could have been made in Spanish lyric poetry, it was one which, as we have seen, the brilliant success of Garcilasso, and the circumstances producing and attending it, rendered inevitable.[839]
Among those who contributed avowedly to this change was Cantorál, who, in 1578, published a volume of verse, in the Preface to which he does not hesitate to say that Spain had hardly produced a poet deserving the name, except Garcilasso;—a poet, as he truly adds, formed on Italian models, and one whose footsteps he himself follows, though at a very humble distance.[840] Another of the lyric poets of the same period, and one who, with better success, took the same direction, was Francisco de Figueroa, a gentleman and a soldier, whose few Castilian poems are still acknowledged in the more choice collections of his native literature, but who lived so long in Italy, and devoted himself so earnestly to the study of its language, that he wrote Italian verse with purity, as well as Spanish.[841] To these should be added Vicente Espinel, who invented the décimas, or renewed the use of them, and who, in a volume of poetry printed in 1591, distinguishes the Italian forms, to which he gives precedence, from the Castilian, in which his efforts, though fewer in number, are occasionally more beautiful than any thing he wrote in the forms he preferred.[842]