But the disposition to follow the great masters of Italy was by no means so general as the examples of Cantorál, Figueroa, and Espinel might seem to imply. Their cases are, in fact, extreme cases, as we can see from the circumstance, that, though Montemayor in his “Diana” was a professed imitator of Sannazaro, still, among the poems scattered through that prose pastoral, and in a volume which he afterwards printed, are found many pieces—and some of them among the best he has left—that belong decidedly to the older and more national school.[843] Similar remarks may be applied to other authors of the same period. Luis Barahona de Soto, of whose lyric poems only a few have reached us, was by no means exclusively of the Italian school, though his principal work, the famous “Tears of Angelica,” is in the manner of Ariosto.[844] And Rufo, while he strove to tread in the footsteps of Petrarch, had yet within him a Castilian genius, which seems to have compelled him, as if against his will, to return to the paths of the elder poets of his own country.[845] A still larger number of the contemporary lyrics of Damian de Vegas[846] and Pedro de Padilla[847] are national in their tone; but best of all is this tone heard, at this period, from Lopez Maldonado, who, sometimes in a gay spirit, and sometimes in one full of tenderness and melancholy, is almost uniformly inspired by the popular feeling and true to the popular instincts.[848]
But it should not be forgotten that during the same period lived the two greatest lyrical poets that Spain has ever produced,—exercising little influence over each other, and still less over their own times. Of one of them, Luis de Leon, who died in 1591, after having given hardly any thing of his poetry to the world, we have already spoken. The other was Fernando de Herrera, an ecclesiastic of Seville,[849] of whom we know only that he lived in the latter part of the sixteenth century; that he died in 1597, at the age of sixty-three years; that Cervantes wrote a sonnet in his honor;[850] and that, in 1619, his friend Francisco Pacheco, the painter, published his works, with a Preface by the kindred spirit of Rioja.[851]
That Herrera was acquainted with some of the unpublished poetry of Luis de Leon is certain, because he cites it in his learned commentary on Garcilasso, printed in 1580; but that he placed Garcilasso de la Vega above Luis de Leon is no less certain from the same commentary, where he often expresses an opinion that Garcilasso was the greatest of all Spanish poets;[852]—an opinion sufficiently obvious in the volume of his own poetry published by himself in 1582, which is altogether in the Italian manner adopted by Garcilasso, and which, increased by poems of a different character in the editions of Pacheco, in 1619, and of Fernandez, in 1808,[853] constitutes all we possess of Herrera’s verse, though certainly not all he wrote.[854]
Some parts of the volume published by himself have little value, such as most of the sonnets,—a form of composition on which he placed an extravagant estimate.[855] Other parts are excellent. Such are his elegies, which are in terza rima, and of which the one addressed to Love beseeching Repose is full of passion, while that in which he expresses his gratitude for the resource of tears is full of tenderness and the gentlest harmony.[856] But his principal success is in his canzones. Of these he wrote sixteen. The least fortunate of them is, perhaps, the one where he most strove to imitate Pindar;—that on the rebellion of the Moors in the Alpuxarras, which he has rendered cold by founding it on the Greek mythology. The best are one on the battle of Lepanto, gained by Herrera’s favorite hero, the young and generous Don John of Austria, and one on the overthrow of Sebastian of Portugal, in his disastrous invasion of Africa. Both were probably written when the minds of men were everywhere stirred by the great events that called them forth; and both were fortunately connected with those feelings of loyalty and religion that always seemed to spring up together in the minds of the Spanish people, and to be of kindred with all their highest poetical inspirations.
The first—that on the battle of Lepanto, which emancipated many thousand Christian captives, and stopped the second westward advance of the Crescent—is a lofty and cheerful hymn of victory, mingling, to a remarkable degree, the jubilant exultation which breaks forth in the Psalms and Prophecies on the conquests of the Jews over their unbelieving enemies, with the feelings of a devout Spaniard at the thought of so decisive an overthrow of the ancient and hated enemy of his faith and country. The other,—an ode on the death of Sebastian of Portugal,—composed, on the contrary, in a vein of despondency, is still romantic and striking, even more, perhaps, than its rival. That unfortunate monarch, who was one of the most chivalrous princes that ever sat on a throne in Christendom, undertook, in 1578, to follow up the great victory of Lepanto by rescuing the whole of the North of Africa from the Moslem yoke, under which it had so long groaned, and to restore to their homes the multitudes of Christians who were there suffering the most cruel servitude. He perished in the generous attempt; hardly fifty of his large army returning to recount the details of the fatal battle, in which he himself had disappeared among the heaps of unrecognized slain. But so fond and fervent was the popular admiration, that, for above a century afterwards, it was believed in Portugal that Don Sebastian would still return and resume the power which, for a time, had so dazzled and deluded the hearts of his subjects.[857]
To the main facts in this melancholy disaster Herrera has happily given a religious turn. He opens his ode with a lament for the affliction of Portugal, and then goes on to show that the generous glory which should have accompanied such an effort against the common enemy of Christendom had been lost in a cruel defeat, because those who undertook the great expedition had been moved only by human ambition, forgetting the higher Christian feelings that should have carried them into a war against the infidel. In this spirit, he cries out,—
But woe to them who, trusting in the strength
Of horses and their chariots’ multitude,
Have hastened, Lybia, to thy desert sands!—
O, woe to them! for theirs is not a hope