CHAPTER VI
THE AGE OF ENRIQUE IV. AND THE CATHOLIC KINGS
1454-1516
The literary movement of Juan II.'s reign is overlapped and continued outside Spain by poets in the train of Alfonso V. of Aragón, who, conquering Naples in 1443, became the patron of scholars like George of Trebizond and Æneas Sylvius. It is notable that, despite their new Italian environment, Alfonso's singers write by preference in Castilian rather than in their native Catalan. Their work is to be sought in the Cancionero General, in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa, and especially in the Cancionero de Stúñiga, which derives its name from the accident that the first two poems in the collection are by Lope de Stúñiga, cousin of that Suero de Quiñones who held the Paso Honroso, mentioned under Lena's name in the previous chapter. Stúñiga prolongs the courtly tradition in verses whose extreme finish is remarkable. Juan de Tapia, Juan de Andújar, and Fernando de la Torre practise in the same school of knightly hedonism; and at the opposite pole is Juan de Valladolid, son of the public executioner, a vagabond minstrel, who passed his life in coarse polemics with Antón de Montero, with Gómez Manrique, and with Manrique's brother, the Conde de Paredes. A notorious name is that of Pero Torrellas, whose Coplas de las calidades de las donas won their author repute as a satirist of women, and begot innumerable replies and counterpleas: the satire, to tell the truth, is poor enough, and is little more than violent but pointless invective. The best as well as the most copious poet of the Neapolitan group is Carvajal (or Carvajales), who bequeaths us the earliest known romance, and so far succumbs to circumstances as to produce occasional verses in Italian. In Castilian, Carvajal has the true lyrical cry, and is further distinguished by a virile, martial note, in admirable contrast with the insipid courtesies of his brethren.
To return to Spain, where, in accordance with the maxim that one considerable poet begets many poetasters, countless rhymesters spring from Mena's loins. The briefest mention must suffice for the too-celebrated Coplas del Provincial, which, to judge by the extracts printed from its hundred and forty-nine stanzas, is a prurient lampoon against private persons. It lacks neither vigour nor wit, and denotes a mastery of mordant phrase: but the general effect of its obscene malignity is to make one sympathise with the repeated attempts at its suppression. The attribution to Rodrigo Cota of this perverse performance is capricious: internal evidence goes to show that the libel is the work of several hands.
A companion piece of far greater merit is found in thirty-two octosyllabic stanzas entitled Coplas de Mingo Revulgo. Like the Coplas del Provincial, this satirical eclogue has been referred to Rodrigo Cota, and, like many other anonymous works, it has been ascribed to Mena. Neither conjecture is supported by evidence, and Sarmiento's ascription of Mingo Revulgo to Hernando del Pulgar, who wrote an elaborate commentary on it, rests on the puerile assumption that "none but the poet could have commented himself with such clearness." Two shepherds—Mingo Revulgo and Gil Aribato—represent the lower and upper class respectively, discussing the abuses of society. Gil Aribato blames the people, whose vices are responsible for corruption in high places; Mingo Revulgo contends that the dissolute King should bear the blame for the ruin of the state, and the argument ends by lauding the golden mean of the burgess. The tone of Mingo Revulgo is more moderate than that of the Provincial; the attacks on current evils are more general, more discreet, and therefore more deadly; and the aim of the later satire is infinitely more serious and elevated. Cast in dramatic form, but devoid of dramatic action, Mingo Revulgo leads directly to the eclogues of Juan del Encina, so often called the father of the Spanish theatre; but its immediate interest lies in the fact that it is the first of effective popular satires.
Among the poets of this age, the Jewish convert, Antón de Montoro, el Ropero (1404-?1480), holds a place apart. A fellow of parts, Montoro combined verse-making with tailoring, and his trade is frequently thrown in his teeth by rivals smarting under his bitter insolence. Save when he pleads manfully for his kinsfolk, who are persecuted and slaughtered by a bloodthirsty mob, Montoro's serious efforts are mostly failures. His picaresque verses, especially those addressed to Juan de Valladolid, are replenished with a truculent gaiety which amuses us almost as much as it amused Santillana; but he should be read in extracts rather than at length. He is suspected of complicity in the Coplas del Provincial, and there is good ground for thinking that to him belong the two most scandalous pieces in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa—namely, the Pleito del Manto (Suit of the Coverlet), and a certain unmentionable comedy which purports to be by Fray Montesino, and travesties Mena's Trescientas in terms of extreme filthiness. Montoro's short pieces are reminiscent of Juan Ruiz, and, for all his indecency, it is fair to credit him with much cleverness and with uncommon technical skill. His native vulgarity betrays him into excesses of ribaldry which mar the proper exercise of his undeniable gifts.
A better man and a better writer is Juan Álvarez Gato (?1433-96), the Madrid knight of whom Gómez Manrique says that he "spoke pearls and silver." It is difficult for us to judge him on his merits, for, though his cancionero exists, it has not yet been printed; and we are forced to study him as he is represented in the Cancionero General, where his love-songs show a dignity of sentiment and an exquisiteness of expression not frequent in any epoch, and exceptional in his own time. His sacred lyrics, the work of his old age, lack unction: but even here his mastery of form saves his pious villancicos from oblivion, and ranks him as the best of Encina's predecessors. His friend, Hernán Mexía, follows Pero Torrellas with a satire on the foibles of women, in which he easily outdoes his model in mischievous wit and in ingenious fancy.
Gómez Manrique, Señor de Villazopeque (1412-91), is a poet of real distinction, whose entire works have been reprinted from two complementary cancioneros discovered in 1885. Sprung from a family illustrious in Spanish history, Gómez Manrique was a foremost leader in the rebellion of the Castilian nobles against Enrique IV. In allegorical pieces like the Batalla de amores, he frankly imitates the Galician model, and in one instance he replies to a certain Don Álvaro in Portuguese. Then he joins himself to the rising Italian school, wherein his uncle, Santillana, had preceded him; and his experiments extend to adaptations of Sem Tob's sententious moralisings, to didactic poems in the manner of Mena, and to coplas on Juan de Valladolid, in which he measures himself unsuccessfully with the rude tailor, Montoro. Humour was not Gómez Manrique's calling, and his attention to form is an obvious preoccupation which diminishes his vigour: but his chivalrous refinement and noble tenderness are manifest in his answer to Torrellas' invective. His pathos is nowhere more touching than in the elegiacs on Garcilaso de la Vega; while in the lines to his wife, Juana de Mendoza, Gómez Manrique portrays the fleetingness of life, the sting of death, with almost incomparable beauty.
His Representación del Nacimiento de Nuestro Señor, the earliest successor to the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, is a liturgical drama written for and played at the convent of Calabazanos, of which his sister was Superior. It consists of twenty octosyllabic stanzas delivered by the Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Gabriel, St. Michael, St. Raphael, an angel, and three shepherds, the whole closing with a cradle-song. Simple as the construction is, it is more elaborate than that of a later play on the Passion, wherein the Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalen appear (though the last takes no part in the dialogue). The refrain or estribillo at the end of each stanza goes to show that this piece was intended to be sung. These primitive essays in the hieratic drama have all the interest of what was virtually a new invention, and their historical importance is only exceeded by that of a secular play, written by Gómez Manrique for the birthday of Alfonso, brother of Enrique IV., in which the Infanta Isabel played one of the Muses. In all three experiments the action is of the slightest, though the dialogue is as dramatic as can be expected from a first attempt. The point to be noted is that Gómez Manrique foreshadows both the lay and sacred elements of the Spanish theatre.
His fame has been unjustly eclipsed by that of his nephew, Jorge Manrique, Señor de Belmontejo (1440-1478), a brilliant soldier and partisan of Queen Isabel's, who perished in an encounter before the gates of Garci-Múñoz, and is renowned by reason of a single masterpiece. His verses are mostly to be found in the Cancionero General, and a few are given in the cancioneros of Seville and Toledo. Like that of his uncle, Gómez, his vein of humour is thin and poor, and the satiric stanzas to his stepmother border on vulgarity. In acrostic love-songs and in other compositions of a like character, Jorge Manrique is merely clever in the artificial style of many contemporaries—is merely a careful craftsman absorbed in the technical details of art, with small merit beyond that of formal dexterity. The forty-three stanzas entitled the Coplas de Jorge Manrique por la muerte de su padre, have brought their writer an immortality which, outliving all freaks of taste, seems as secure as Cervantes' own. An attempt has been made to prove that Jorge Manrique's elegiacs on his father are not original, and that the elegist had some knowledge of Abu 'l-Bakā Salih ar-Rundi's poem on the decadence of the Moslem power in Spain. Undoubtedly Valera has so ingeniously rendered the Arab poet as to make the resemblance seem pronounced: but the theory is untenable, for it is not pretended that Jorge Manrique could read Arabic, and lofty commonplaces on death abound in all literature, from the Bible downwards.
In this unique composition Jorge Manrique approves himself, for once, a poet of absolute genius, an exquisite in lyrical orchestration. The poem opens with a slow movement, a solemn lament on the vanity of grandeur, the frailty of life; it modulates into resigned acceptance of an inscrutable decree; it closes with a superb symphony, through which are heard the voices of the seraphim and the angelic harps of Paradise. The workmanship is of almost incomparable excellence, and in scarcely one stanza can the severest criticism find a technical flaw. Jorge Manrique's sincerity touched a chord which vibrates in the universal heart, and his poem attained a popularity as immediate as it was imperishable. Camões sought to imitate it; writers like Montemôr and Silvestre glossed it; Lope de Vega declared that it should be written in letters of gold; it was done into Latin and set to music in the sixteenth century by Venegas de Henestrosa; and in our century it has been admirably translated by Longfellow in a version from which these stanzas are taken:—