We may not, perhaps, be ready to echo much of this praise. The oppressor of a free people must always hold an obnoxious position; and when to the severe and unpitying system he adopted towards others, we find that he indulged his own passions even to the detriment of his sovereign's interests, we feel somewhat of contempt mingled with resentment. We are told that in person he was tall and robust, dignified in his deportment, but ugly in the face. His complexion was singularly dark, and the expression of his countenance haughty; his eyes were vivacious and sparkling; and we may believe that his irregular and harsh features were redeemed in some degree by the intellect that informed them.
In judging of him as a poet, he falls far short of Garcilaso; but in some respects he may be considered as superior to Boscan. His short and simple poems, named in Spanish vilancicos, are full of life and spirit, and are fitted to become popular from the simplicity and yet vivacity of their sentiments and versification: they are the sparkling emanations of the passions, expressed at the moment, with all the ardour of living emotion. Indeed, he so far indulged in this sort of composition, tempting to one who feels that he can thus impart, and so perhaps obtain sympathy for, the emotions that boil within him, that most of his smaller poems remain inedited as being too free; the Spanish press never being permitted to put forth works of a licentious nature. His epistles imitated from Horace, want elegance and harmony; but they are forcible, and full of excellent sense and good feeling. He could not rise to the sublime. There is a complimentary ode of his addressed to cardinal Espinosa, on his assuming the hat, for the writing of which, we are told by his secretary, that he prepared by three days' study of Pindar; but it breathes no Pindaric fire; there is bathos rather than height in the similes he makes, drawn from the purple of the cardinal's new dress, and the crimson colours with which the sun invests the empyreum. Mendoza was not an imaginative poet; and it is observable, that when a person, not such by nature, deals in the ideal, the result is rather the ridiculous than the sublime. Acute, earnest, playful, passionate, but neither tender nor sublime, if we except a few of his minor love poems, we read Mendoza's verses rather to become acquainted with the man than seek the soul of poetry in his compositions.
[21]The penetration with which Mendoza saw through the lofty pretensions of diplomacy, and the keenness of his observation, which stripped this science of all its finery, is forcibly expressed in one of his epistles, He exclaims—
"O embaxadores, puros majaderos,
que si los reges quieren engañar,
comiençan por nosotros los primeros.
Nuestro major negocio es, no dañar,
y jamas hacer cosa, ni dezilla,
que no corramos riesgo de enseñar."
O ye ambassadors! ye simpletons! When kings wish to deceive they begin first with us.—Our chief business is to do no harm, and never to do or say anything, that we may not run the risk of making others as wise as ourselves.
[22]Mendoza felt himself obliged in his own person to refrain from all censure on the edicts of his sovereign. But in a speech he introduced after the manner of Sallust, as spoken by one of the chiefs, he conveyed, in forcible terms, his sense of the persecution which the unhappy Moors endured. The conspirator exclaims: "What hinders a man, speaking Castilian, from following the law of the prophet, or one who speaks Morisco from following that of Jesus? They take our children to their congregations and schools, teaching them arts which our ancestors forbade, that purity of the law might not be disturbed nor its truth disputed. We are threatened at every hour that they shall be taken from the arms of their mothers and the bringing up of their fathers, and carried into distant lands, where they will forget our customs, and learn to become the enemies of the fathers who begot them, and the mothers who bore them. We are ordered to cast off our national dress, and to adopt the Castilian. Germans dress after one manner, the French after another, the Greeks after another. The clergy have a peculiar garb—youths one sort of dress—old men another—each nation, and each profession, and each rank, adopts its own style of dress. Yet all are Christians. And we Moors—why do we dress in the Morisco, as if our faith hung in our garb—not in our hearts?"
[LUIS DE LEON]
1527-1591.
There is a variety in the physiognomy and character of the poets whose biography is here traced, that renders each in himself highly interesting; our misfortune is that we know so little of them. Sedano bitterly laments the obscurity which wraps the history of the great literary men of Spain, through the neglect of their contemporaries to transmit the circumstances of their lives. We have but slight sketches; yet their works, joined to these, individualise the man, and give animation and interest to very slender details. We image Boscan in his rural retirement, philosophising, book in hand;—revolving in his thoughts the harmonies of verse, conversing with his friends, enjoying with placid smile the calm content, or rather, may we not say, the perfect home-felt, heart-reaching happiness of his married life, which he felt so truly, and describes in such lively colours. Young still, his affections ardent, but concentrated, he acknowledges that serenity, confidence, and sweet future hopes; unreserved sympathy, and entire community of the interests of life, is the real Paradise on earth. Garcilaso, the gallant soldier, the tender poet, the admired and loved of all, is of another character, more heroic, more soft, more romantic. Mendoza, with his fiery eye, his vehement temper, his untamed passions—and these mingled with respect for learning, friendship for the worthy, and talents that exalted his nature to something noble and immortal, despite his defects, contrasts with his friends: and the fourth now coming, Luis de Leon—more earnest and enthusiastic than Boscan—tender as Garcilaso, but with a soul whose tenderness was engrossed by heavenly not earthly love—pure and high-hearted, with the nobility of genius stamped on his brow, but with religious resignation calming his heart,—he is different, but more complete—a man Spain only could produce; for in Spain only had religion such sovereign sway as wholly to reduce the rebel inclinations of man, and, by substituting supernal for terrestrial love, not diminish the fulness and tenderness of passion, but only give it another object. High poetic powers being joined not only to the loftiest religious enthusiasm, to learning, but also the works of this amiable and highly-gifted man are different from all others, but exquisite in their class. We wish to learn more of his mind: as it is, we know little, except that as his compositions were characteristic of his virtues, so were the events of his life of his country.
The family of Luis Ponce de Leon was the noblest in Andalusia. He was born at Granada in the year 1527. It would appear that his childhood was not happy, for in an ode to the Virgin, written when in the dungeons of the inquisition, he touchingly speaks of his abandonment in infancy, saying:—