His “Diana Enamorada,” the chief of his works, was first printed at Valencia, in 1542.[61] It is written in good Castilian, like his poetry, which is published separately, though, like that, with some intermixture of his native Portuguese;[62] and it contains, as he tells us, stories of adventures which really occurred.[63] We know, too, that, under the name of Sereno, he was himself its hero; and Lope de Vega adds, that Diana, its heroine, was a lady of Valencia de Don Juan, a town near the city of Leon.[64] Montemayor’s purpose, therefore, like that of Sannazaro, is to give, in the forms of a pastoral romance, an account of some events in his own life and in the lives of a few of his friends. To effect this, he brings together on the banks of the Ezla, at the foot of the mountains of Leon, a number of shepherds and shepherdesses, who relate their respective stories through seven books of prose, intermingled with verse. But the two principal personages, Sereno and Diana, who are introduced at first as lovers, are separated by magic; and the romance is brought to an abrupt conclusion, little conformable to all the previous intimations, by the marriage of Diana to Delio, the unworthy rival of Sereno.
On first reading the Diana of Montemayor, it is not easy to understand it. The separate stories of which it is composed are so involved with each other, and so inartificially united, that we are constantly losing the thread of the principal narration;—a difficulty which is much increased by the mixture of true and false geography, heathenism, magic, Christianity, and all the various contradictory impossibilities that naturally follow an attempt to place in the heart of Spain, and near one of its best-known cities, a poetical Arcadia, that never existed anywhere. The Diana, however, better merits the name of a romance than the Arcadia, which served for its model. Its principal fiction is ampler and more ingeniously constructed. Its episodes are more interesting. Much of it is warm with the tenderness of a disappointed attachment, which, no doubt, caused the whole to be written. Some of the poetry is beautiful, especially the lyric poetry; and if its prose style is not so pure as that of Sannazaro, it is still to be remarked for its grace and richness. Notwithstanding its many defects, therefore, the Diana is not without an interest for us even at this remote period, when the whole class of fictions to which it belongs is discountenanced and almost forgotten; and we feel that only poetical justice was done to it when it was saved, by the good taste of the curate, in the destruction of Don Quixote’s library.
The Diana, as has been intimated, was left unfinished by its author; but in 1564, three years after his death, Alonso Perez, a physician of Salamanca, to whom Montemayor, before he finally left Spain, had communicated his plan for completing it, published a second part, which opens in the enchanted palace of Felicia, where the first ends, and gives us the adventures and stories of several shepherds and shepherdesses, not introduced before, as well as a continuation of the original fiction. But this second part, like the first, fails to complete the romance. It advances no farther than to the death of Delio, the husband of Diana,—which, according to the purpose of Montemayor, was to have been followed by her union with Sereno, her first and true lover,—and then stops abruptly, with the promise of yet a third part, which never appeared. Nor was it, probably, demanded with any earnestness; for the second, protracted through seven books, and considerably longer than its predecessor, is much inferior to it in merit. It lacks, in all its many stories, the tenderness which the disappointment of Montemayor had given to the first portion of the work; and, what perhaps is of no less consequence in this kind of composition, the prose is heavy and monotonous, and the verse worse.[65]
But this unfortunate attempt was not the only consequence of Montemayor’s success. The same year with that in which the work of Perez was published, another continuation appeared at Valencia, by Gaspar Gil Polo, a gentleman of that city, who was a Professor of Greek in its University.[66] The Diana of Polo has the merit of being shorter than either of its predecessors. It is divided into five books, and contains an account of the falsehood and death of Delio, and the marriage of Diana to Sereno, whom she finds when she is seeking the husband who had basely abandoned her for another shepherdess. Several episodes and much pastoral poetry of different kinds are skilfully inserted; but though the original plan of Montemayor seems to be completed, the book ends with the promise of a still further continuation, which, though the author lived nearly thirty years after he made it, seems never to have been written.[67] His work, however, was successful. Its prose has always found favor, and so have some portions of its verse; especially the cancion of Nerea in the third book, and several of the shorter poems in the last.[68]
The “Ten Books of Fortune and Love,” by Antonio de Lo Frasso, a Sardinian and a soldier, published in 1573, is the next Spanish romance of the same class with the Diana; but it is without merit, and was forgotten soon after it appeared.[69] Nine years later, in 1582, a better one was published,—the “Fílida,”—which passed early through five editions, and is still valued and read.[70] Its author, Luis Galvez de Montalvo, was born in Guadalaxara, a town near Alcalá, the birthplace of Cervantes; and, perhaps from this circumstance, they soon became acquainted, for they were long friends, and often praised each other in their respective works.[71] They seem, however, to have had very different characters; for, instead of the life of adventure led by Cervantes, Montalvo attached himself to the great family of Infantado, descended from the Marquis of Santillana, and passed most of his life as a sort of idle courtier and retainer in their ducal halls, near the place of his nativity. Subsequently he went to Italy, where he translated and published, in 1587, “The Tears of Saint Peter,” by Tansillo, and had begun a translation of the “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso, when he was cut off in the midst of his labors by an accidental death, in Sicily, about the year 1591.[72]
His “Fílida,” in seven parts, was written while he was attached to the Duke of Infantado; for he announces himself on the title-page as “a gentleman and a courtier,” and, in his Dedication to one of the family, says that “his greatest labor is to live idle, contented, and honored as one of the servants of their house.” The romance contains, as was usual in such works, the adventures of living and known personages, among whom were Montalvo himself, Cervantes, and the nobleman to whom it is dedicated. But the tone of pastoral life is not better preserved than it is in the other fictions of the same class. Indeed, in the sixth part, there is a most inappropriate critical discussion on the merits of the two schools of Spanish poetry then contending for fashionable mastery; and in the seventh is a courtly festival, with running at the ring, in which the shepherds appear on horseback with lances and armorial bearings, like knights. The prose style of the whole is pure and good; and among the poems with which it abounds, a few in the old Spanish measure may be selected that are nearly, if not quite, equal to the similar poems of Montemayor.
Cervantes, too, as we have already noticed, was led by the spirit of the times, rather, perhaps, than by his own taste, to begin—as an offering to the lady of his love—the “Galatea,” of which the first six books, published in 1584, were all that ever appeared.[73] This was followed, in 1586, by “Truth for the Jealous”; again a romance in six books, and, like the last, unfinished. It was written by Bartolomé Lopez de Enciso, of whom we know from himself that he was a young man when he wrote it, and that it was his purpose to publish a second part, of which, however, nothing more was heard. Nor can we regret that he failed to fulfil his promise. His fictions, which are occupied chiefly with the nymphs and shepherds of the Tagus, are among the most confused and unmeaning that have ever been attempted. His scene is laid, from its opening, in the days of the most ancient Greek mythology; but the Genius of Spain, in the fifth book, carries the same shepherds who thus figure in the first to a magnificent temple, and shows them the statues of Charles the Fifth, of Philip the Second, and even of Philip the Third, who was not yet on the throne;—thus confounding the earliest times of classical antiquity with an age which, at the end of the sixteenth century, was yet to come. Other inconsequences follow, in great numbers, as matters of course, while nothing in either the prose or the poetry is of value enough to compensate for the absurdities in the story. Indeed, few portions of Spanish literature show any thing more stiff and wearisome than the long declamations and discussions in this dull fiction.[74]
Another pastoral romance in six books, entitled “The Nymphs of the Henares,” by Bernardo Gonzalez de Bovadilla, was printed in 1587. The author, who was a native of the Canary Islands, confesses that he has placed the scene of his story on the banks of the Henares without having ever seen them; but both he and his romance have long since been forgotten. So has “The Shepherds of Iberia,” in four books, by Bernardo de la Vega, supposed to have been a native of Madrid, and certainly a canon of Tucuman, in Peru, whose ill-written story appeared in 1591. But that these, and all that preceded them, enjoyed for a time the public favor is made plain by the fact, that they are all found in the library of Don Quixote, and that three of them receive high praise from Cervantes;—much higher than has been confirmed by the decision of subsequent generations.[75]
Some time, however, elapsed before another came to continue the series, except the “Arcadia” of Lope de Vega, which, though written long before, was not printed till 1598.[76] At last, “The Age of Gold,” by Bernardo de Balbuena, appeared. Its author, born on the vine-clad declivities of the Val de Peñas, in 1568, early accompanied his family to Mexico, where he was educated, and where, when only seventeen years old, he was already known as a poet. Once, at least, he visited his native country, and perhaps oftener; but he seems to have spent most of his life, either in Jamaica, where he enjoyed an ecclesiastical benefice, or in Puerto Rico, of which he was afterwards bishop, and where he died in 1627.
Of the manners of the New World, however, or of its magnificent scenery, his “Age of Gold in the Woods of Eriphile” shows no trace. It was printed at Madrid, in 1608, and might have been written, if its author had never been in any other city. But it is not without merit. The poetry with which it abounds is generally of the Italian school, but is much better than can be found in most of these doubtful romances; and its prose, though sometimes affected, is oftener sweet and flowing. Probably nothing in the nine eclogues—as its divisions are unsuitably called—is connected with either the history or the scandal of the times; and if this be the case, we have, perhaps, an explanation of the fact that it was less regarded by those contemporary with its publication than were similar works of inferior merit. But whatever may have been the cause, it was long overlooked; no second edition of it being demanded till 1821, when it received the rare honor of being published anew by the Spanish Academy.[77]