Didactic poetry in unsettled and uncertain forms appeared early in Spain, and took, from time to time, the air both of moral philosophy and of religious instruction. Specimens of it in the old long-line stanza are found from the age of Berceo to that of the chancellor Ayala; few, indeed, in number, but sufficiently marked in character to show their purpose. Later, examples become more numerous, and present themselves in forms somewhat improved. Several such occur in the Cancioneros, among the best of which are Ludueña’s “Rules for Good-Breeding”; “The Complaint of Fortune,” in imitation of Bias, by Diego de San Pedro; and the “Coplas” of Don Juan Manuel of Portugal, on the Seven Deadly Sins;—all of them authors known at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. Boscan’s poem on his own Conversion, that of Silvestre on “Self-knowledge,” that of Castilla on “The Virtues,” and that of Juan de Mendoza on “A Happy Life,” continue the series through the reign of Charles the Fifth, but without materially advancing its claims or its character.[24]
In the age of Philip the Second, the didactic, like most of the other branches of Spanish poetry, spreads out more broadly. Francisco de Guzman’s “Opinions of Wise Men,” and especially his dull allegory of “Moral Triumphs,” in imitation of Petrarch, are, for their length, the most important of the different didactic poems which that period produced.[25] But more characteristic than either is the deeply religious letter of Francisco de Aldana to Montano, in 1573; and much more beautiful and touching than either is one written at about the same time by Juan Rufo to his infant son, filled with gentle affection and wise counsels.
Neither should a call made by Aldana, in the name of military glory, to Philip himself, urging him to defend the suffering Church, be overlooked. It breathes the very spirit of its subject, and may well be put in direct contrast with the earnest and sad persuasions to peace by Virues, who was yet a soldier by profession, and with Cantorál’s winning invitation to the quietness of a country life. Some of the religious poetry of Diego de Morillo and Pedro de Salas, in the next reigns, with several of the wise epistles of the Argensolas, Artieda, and Mesa, should be added; but they are all comparatively short poems, except those by Morillo on the Words of Christ upon the Cross, which extend to several hundred lines on each word, and which, though disfigured by antithesis and exaggeration, are strongly marked specimens of the Catholic didactic spirit.
In the mean time, and in the midst of this group,—partly because the way had been already prepared for it by the publication, in 1591, of a good translation of Horace’s “Art of Poetry” by Espinel, and partly from other causes,[26]—we have, at last, a proper didactic poem, or rather an attempt at one. It is by Juan de la Cueva, who in 1605 wrote in terza rima three epistles, which he entitled “Egemplar Poético,” and which constitute the oldest formal and original effort of the kind in the Spanish language. Regarded as a whole, they are, indeed, far from being a complete Art of Poetry, and in some parts they are injudicious and inconsequent; but they not unfrequently contain passages of acute criticism in flowing verse, and they have, besides, the merit of nationality in their tone. In all respects, they are better than an absurd didactic poem, by the same author, on “The Inventors of Things,” which he wrote three years later, and which shows, as he showed elsewhere, that he adventured in too many departments.[27]
Pablo de Céspedes, a sculptor and painter of the same period,—now better known as a man of learning and a poet,—came nearer to success than Cueva. He was born in 1538, at Córdova, and died there, a minor canon of its magnificent cathedral, at the age of seventy; but he spent a part of his life in Italy and at Seville, and devoted much of his leisure to letters. Among other works, he began a poem, in ottava rima, on “The Art of Painting.” Whether it was ever finished is uncertain; but all we possess of it is a series of fragments, amounting, when taken together, to six or seven hundred lines, which were inserted in a prose treatise on the same subject by his friend Francisco Pacheco, and printed above forty years after their author’s death. They are, however, such as to make us regret that we have received no more. Their versification is excellent, and their poetical energy and compactness are uniform. Perhaps the best passage that has been preserved is the description of a horse,—the animal of whose race the poet’s native city has always been proud,—and of which, it is evident, a single noble individual was pictured before his mind as he wrote. But other portions show much talent,—perhaps more than this does; especially one in which he explains the modes of acquiring practical skill in his art, and that more poetical one in which he discusses color.[28]
But the poems of Cueva and Céspedes were not printed till long after the death of their authors; and none of their contemporaries was inspired by like influences. The best that was done in didactic poetry, at about the same time, was the slight, but pleasant, sort of defence of his own irregularities produced by Lope de Vega, under the name of “The New Art of Writing Plays”; and the best, written later in the century, were the “Selvas,” as he called them, or poems in irregular verse, by Count Rebolledo, on the Arts of War and Civil Government, which date from 1652, but which are little more than rhymed prose. A long poem in ten cantos, and in the old quintilla verse, by Trapeza, published in 1612, and entitled “The Cross,” because it is a sort of exposition of all the theological virtues attributed to that holy emblem, is too dull to be noticed, even if it were more strictly didactic in its form.[29]
Some other kindred attempts should, however, be remembered, of which the oldest, made in the spirit of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout Europe, were in the form called “Emblems,” or explanations in verse for hieroglyphical devices. The most successful of these were probably the Emblems of Daza, in 1549, imitated from the more famous Latin ones of Alciatus; and those of Covarrubias, published originally in Spanish by their author in 1591, and afterwards translated by him into Latin;—both of them curious specimens of this peculiar style of composition, and as agreeable, perhaps, as any which the age of Emblems produced.[30]
The other form was that in which the didactic runs into the descriptive. Of this the most poetical example in Spanish is by Dicastillo, a Carthusian monk, at Saragossa, who published, in 1637, under the auspices of his friend Mencos, a long poetical correspondence, intended to teach the vanity of human things, and the happiness and merit to be found in a life of penitential seclusion. The parts that relate to the author himself are sometimes touching; but the rest is of very unequal worth,—the better portions being devoted to a description of the grand and sombre monastery of which he was an inmate, and of the observances to which his life there was devoted.[31] Castilian verse, however, did not often take a descriptive character, except when it appeared in the form of eclogues and idyls; and even then it is almost always marked by an ingenuity and brilliancy far from the healthy tone inspired by a sincere love of what is grand or beautiful in nature;—a remark which finds ample illustration in the poems devoted to the Spanish conquests in America, where the marvellous tropical vegetation of the valleys through which the wild adventurers wound their way, and the snow-capped volcanoes that crowned the sierras above their heads, seem to have failed alike to stir their imaginations or overawe their courage.[32]
But except these irregular varieties of didactic poetry, we have, for the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, nothing to add to what we have already noticed, beyond a repetition of the old forms of epistles and silvas, which so frequently occur in the works of Castillejo, Ledesma, Lope de Vega, Jauregui, Zarate, and their contemporaries. Nor could we reasonably expect more. Neither the popular character of Spanish poetry, nor the severe nature of the Spanish ecclesiastical and political constitutions of government, was favorable to the development of this particular form of verse, or likely to tolerate it on any important subject. Didactic poetry remained, therefore, at the end of the period, as it was at the beginning, one of the feeblest and least successful departments of the national literature.[33]