[778] P. 198.
Saa di Miranda. 10. The lyric poems of Mendoza, written in the old national style, tacitly improved and polished, are preferred by the Spaniards to his other works. Many of them are printed in the Romancero General. Saa di Miranda, though a Portuguese, has written much in Castilian, as well as in his own language. Endowed by nature with the melancholy temperament akin to poetic sensibility, he fell readily into the pastoral strain, for which his own language is said to be peculiarly formed. The greater and better part of his eclogues, however, are in Castilian. He is said to have chosen the latter language for imagery, and his own for reflection.[779] Of this poet, as well as of his Castilian contemporaries, the reader will find a sufficient account in Bouterwek and Sismondi.
[779] Bouterwek, p. 240. Sismondi.
Ribeyro. 11. Portugal, however, produced one who did not abandon her own soft and voluptuous dialect, Ribeyro; the first distinguished poet she could boast. His strains are chiefly pastoral, the favourite style of his country, and breathe that monotonous and excessive melancholy, with which it requires some congenial emotion of our own to sympathise. A romance of Ribeyro, Menina e Moça, is one of the earliest among the few specimens of noble prose which we find in that language. It is said to be full of obscure allusions to real events in the author’s life, and cannot be read with much interest; but some have thought that it is the prototype of the Diana of Montemayor, and the whole school of pastoral romance, which was afterwards admired in Europe for an entire century. We have however seen that the Arcadia of Sannazzaro has the priority; and I am not aware that there is any specific distinction between that romance and this of Ribeyro. It should be here observed, that Ribeyro should perhaps have been mentioned before; his eclogues seem to have been written and possibly published, before the death of Emanuel in 1521. The romance however was a later production.[780]
[780] Bouterwek, Hist. of Portuguese Liter., p. 24. Sismondi, iv. 280.
French poetry. 12. The French versifiers of the age of Francis I. are not few. It does not appear that they rise above the level of the preceding reigns, Louis XI., Charles VIII., and Louis XII.; some of them mistaking insipid allegory for the creations of fancy, some tamely describing the events of their age, others, with rather more spirit, satirising the vices of mankind, and especially of the clergy; while many, in little songs, expressed their ideal love with more perhaps of conventional gallantry than passion or tenderness,[781] yet with some of those light and graceful touches which distinguish this style of French poetry. Clément Marot ranks far higher. |Marot.| The psalms of Marot, though famous in their day, are among his worst performances. His distinguishing excellence is a naïveté, or pretended simplicity, of which it is the highest praise to say, that it was the model of La Fontaine. This style of humour, than which nothing is more sprightly or diverting, seems much less indigenous among ourselves, if we may judge by our older literature, than either among the French or Italians.
[781] Goujet, Bibliothèque Française vols. x. and xi. passim. Auguis, Recueil des Anciens Poëtes Français, vols. ii. and iii.
Their metrical structure. 13. In the days of Marot, French poetry had not put on all its chains. He does not observe the regular alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, nor scruple the open vowel, the suppression of a mute e before a consonant in scanning the verse, the carrying on the sense, without a pause, to the middle of the next line. These blemishes, as later usage accounts them, are common to Marot with all his contemporaries. In return, they dealt much in artificial schemes of recurring words or lines, as the chant royal, where every stanza was to be in the same rhyme, and to conclude with the same verse; or the rondeau, a very popular species of metre long afterwards, wherein two or three initial words were repeated at the refrain or close of every stanza.[782]
[782] Goujet, Bibl. Française, xi. 36. Gaillard, Vie de François I., vii. 20. Pasquier, Recherches de la France, l. vii. c. 5. Auguis, vol. iii.
German poetry. 14. The poetical and imaginative spirit of Germany, subdued as it had long been, was never so weak as in this century. Though we cannot say that this poverty of genius was owing to the Reformation, it is certain that the Reformation aggravated very much in this sense the national debasement. The controversies were so scholastic in their terms, so sectarian in their character, so incapable of alliance with any warmth of soul, that, so far as their influence extended, and that was to a large part of the educated classes, they must have repressed every poet, had such appeared, by rendering the public insensible to his superiority. The meister-singers were sufficiently prosaic in their original constitution; they neither produced, nor perhaps would have suffered to exhibit itself, any real excellence in poetry. But they became in the sixteenth century still more rigorous in their requisitions of a mechanical conformity to rule; while at the same time they prescribed a new code of law to the versifier, that of theological orthodoxy. |Hans Sachs.| Yet one man, of more brilliant fancy and powerful feeling than the rest, Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nuremberg, stands out from the crowd of these artizans. Most conspicuous as a dramatic writer, his copious muse was silent in no line of verse. Heinsius accounts the bright period of Hans Sachs’s literary labours to have been from 1530 to 1538; though he wrote much both sooner and after that time. His poems of all kinds are said to have exceeded six thousand; but not more than one-fourth of them are in print. In this facility of composition he is second only to Lope de Vega; and it must be presumed that, uneducated, unread, accustomed to find his public in his own class, so wonderful a fluency was accompanied by no polish, and only occasionally by gleams of vigour and feeling. The German critics are divided concerning the genius of Hans Sachs: Wieland and Goethe gave him lustre at one time by their eulogies; but these having been as exaggerated as the contempt of a former generation, the place of the honest and praiseworthy shoemaker seems not likely to be fixed very high; and there has not been demand enough for his works, which are very scarce, to encourage their republication.[783]