More learned, more professional and less spontaneous than Santillana, his friend Juan de Mena was in his place as secretary to Juan II. We know little of him except that he was born at Córdoba in 1411, that his youth was passed in poverty, that his studies began late, that he travelled in Italy, and that, after his introduction at court, he was a universal favourite till his death in 1456. Universal favourites are apt to be men of supple character, and it must have needed some dexterity to stand equally well with Álvaro de Luna and Santillana. Perhaps a Spaniard is entitled to be judged by the Spanish code, and Spaniards seem to regard Mena as a man of independent spirit. But it is unfortunate that our national standards in such matters differ so widely: for the question of Mena’s personal character bears on the ascription to him of certain verses which no courtier could have written.
With the disputable exception of Villena, Juan de Mena is the worst prose-writer in the Spanish language, and no one can doubt the justice of this verdict who glances at Mena’s commentary on his own poem La Coronación, or at his abridged version of the Iliad as he found it in the Ilias latina of Italicus. These lumbering performances are fatal to the theory that Mena wrote the Crónica de Don Juan II., a good specimen of clear and fluent prose. The ponderous humour of the verses which he meant to be light is equally fatal to the theory that he wrote the Coplas de la Panadera, a political pasquinade—not unlike The Rolliad—ascribed with much more probability by Argote de Molina to Íñigo Ortiz de Stúñiga. Till very recently, there was a bad habit of ascribing to Mena anonymous compositions written during his life—and even afterwards. But this is at an end, and we shall hear little more of Mena as the author of the Crónica de Juan II., of the Coplas de la Panadera, and of the Celestina. Henceforward attributions will be based on some reasonable ground.
Mena had an almost superstitious reverence for the classics, and describes the Iliad as ‘a holy and seraphic work.’ Unfortunately he is embarrassed by his learning, or rather by a deliberate pedantry which is even more offensive now than it was in his day. It takes a poet as great as Milton to carry off a burden of erudition, and Mena was no Milton. But he was a poet of high aims, and he produced a genuinely impressive allegorical poem in El Laberinto de Fortuna, more commonly known as Las Trezientas. The explanation of this popular title is simple. The poem in its original form consisted of nearly three hundred stanzas—297 to be precise—and another hand has added three more, no doubt to make the poem correspond exactly to its current title. Some of you may remember the story of Juan II.’s asking Mena to write sixty-five more stanzas so that there might be one for every day in the year; and the poet is said to have died leaving only twenty-four of these additional stanzas behind him. This is quite a respectable tradition as traditions go, for it is recorded by the celebrated commentator Hernán Núñez, who wrote within half a century of the poet’s death. We cannot, of course, know what Juan II. said, or did not say, to Mena; but the twenty-four stanzas are in existence, and the internal evidence goes to show that they were written after Mena’s time. They deal severely with the King—the ‘prepotente señor’ of whom Mena always speaks, as a court poet must speak, in terms of effusive compliment. Here, however, the question of character arises, and, as I have already noted, Spaniards and foreigners are at variance.
Thanks to M. Foulché-Delbosc, we are all of us at last able to read El Laberinto de Fortuna in a critical edition, and to study the history of the text reconstructed for us by the most indefatigable and exact scholar now working in the field of Spanish literature. It has been denied that El Laberinto de Fortuna owes anything to the Divina Commedia. The influence of Dante is plain in the adoption of the seven planetary circles, in the fording of the stream, in the vision of what was, and is, and is to be. The Laberinto contains reminiscences of the Roman de la Rose, and passages freely translated from Mena’s fellow-townsman Lucan. It is derivative, and, though comparatively short, it is often tedious. But are not most allegorical poems tedious? Macaulay has been reproached for saying that few readers are ‘in at the death of the Blatant Beast’: the fact being that Macaulay’s wonderful memory failed for once. The Blatant Beast was never killed. But how many educated men, how many professional literary critics, can truthfully say that they have read the whole of the Faerie Queene? How many of these few are prepared to have their knowledge tested? I notice that, now as always, a significant silence follows these innocent questions; and, merely pausing to observe that there are two cantos on Mutability to read after the Blatant Beast breaks ‘his yron chaine’ in the Sixth Book, I pass on.
The Laberinto, with its constant over-emphasis, is not to be compared with the Faerie Queene; but it has passages of stately beauty, it breathes a passionate pride in the glory of Castile, and, while the poet does all that metrical skill can do to lessen the monotonous throb of the versos de arte mayor, he also strives to endow Spain with a new poetic diction. Mena thought meanly of the vernacular—el rudo y desierto romance—as a vehicle of expression, and he was logically driven to innovate. He failed, partly because he latinised to excess; yet many of his novelties—diáfano and nítido, for example—are now part and parcel of the language, and many more deserved a better fate than death by ridicule. Like Herrera, who attempted a similar reform in the next century, Mena was too far in advance of his contemporaries; but this is not necessarily a sign of unintelligence. Mena was too closely wedded to his classical idols to develop into a great poet; still, at his happiest, he is a poet of real impressiveness, and his command of exalted rhetoric and resonant music enable him to represent—better even than Góngora, a far more splendid artist—the characteristic tradition of the poetical school of Córdoba.
I must find time to say a few words about Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (also called, after his supposed birthplace in Galicia, Rodríguez del Padrón), whose few scattered poems are mostly love-songs, less scandalous than might be expected from such alarming titles as Los Mandamientos de Amor and Siete Gozos de Amor. Nothing in these amatory lyrics is so attractive as the legend which has formed round their author. He is supposed to have served in the household of Cardinal Juan de Cervantes about the year 1434, to have travelled in Italy and in the East, to have been page to Juan II., to have become entangled at court in some perilous amour, to have brought about a breach by his indiscreet revelations to a talkative friend, to have fled into solitude, and to have become a Franciscan monk. Some such story is adumbrated in Rodríguez de la Cámara’s novel El Siervo libre de Amor, and the romantic part of it—the love-episode—is confirmed by the official chronicler of the Franciscan Order. An anonymous writer of the sixteenth century goes on to state that Rodríguez de la Cámara went to France, became the lover of the French queen, and was killed near Calais in an attempt to escape to England. The imaginative nature of this postscript discredits the writer’s assertion that Rodríguez de la Cámara’s mistress at the Spanish court was Queen Juana, the second wife of Juan II.’s son, Enrique IV. Rightly or wrongly, Juana of Portugal is credited with many lovers, but Rodríguez de la Cámara was certainly not one of them. As El Siervo libre de Amor was written not later than 1439, the adventures recounted in it must have occurred—if they ever occurred at all—before this date; but the future Enrique IV. was first married in 1440 (to Blanca of Navarre), and his second marriage (to Juana of Portugal) did not take place till 1455. A simple comparison of dates is enough to ensure Juana’s acquittal. Few people like to see a scandalous story about historical personages destroyed in this cold-blooded way, and it has accordingly been suggested that the heroine was Juan II.’s second wife, the Isabel of Portugal who brought Álvaro de Luna to the scaffold. The substitution is capricious, but it has a plausible air. Chronology, again, comes to the rescue. Rodríguez de la Cámara became a monk before 1445, and Isabel of Portugal did not marry Juan II. till 1447. The identity of the lady is even harder to establish than that of the elusive Portuguese beauty celebrated during the next century by Bernardim de Ribeiro in Menina e Moça.
There are scores of Spanish books which you may read more profitably than Rodríguez de la Cámara’s novels. El Siervo libre de Amor and the Estoria de los dos amadores, Ardanlier é Liessa; and better verses than any he ever wrote may be found in the Cancionero of Juan Alfonso de Baena, who formed this corpus poeticum at some date previous to the death of Queen María, Juan II.’s first wife, in 1445. But Rodríguez de la Cámara has the distinction of being the first courtly poet to put his name to a romance. One of the three which he signs, and which were first brought to light by Professor Rennert, is a recast of a famous romance on Count Arnaldos. He was not the only court-poet of his time who condescended to write in the popular vein. Two romances, one of them bearing the date 1442, are given in the Cancionero de Stúñiga above the name of Carvajal who, as he resided at the court of Alfonso V. of Aragón in Naples, is outside the limits of our jurisdiction. But the best romances, the work of anonymous poets disdained by Santillana and more learned writers, will afford matter for another lecture.