Upon his return from this expedition, Don Alonso narrowly escaped an early and disastrous end. News having been received at the city of La Imperial, where the head-quarters of the Spanish army were fixed, that Philip II. had succeeded to the Spanish crown in consequence of the abdication of his father, it was thought proper to solemnise the event by holding a tournament, after the fashion of those days of martial spirit, chivalrous feeling, and imperfect civilisation. Among the various shows and feats of skill there was an estafermo, a figure of wood or pasteboard, in striking which knights made a trial of their strength and dexterity. Don Alonso de Ercilla and a cavalier called Don Juan de Pineda had a dispute, each pretending to have struck the best blow. They soon passed from mock to real battle, drew their swords, and were followed by their respective partisans; so that the games, as not unfrequently happened in those martial amusements, were converted into strife and confusion. The general having, it is said, previously suspected the existence of a plot against his authority, concluded that this encounter at the games was meant to be the precursor of its execution. The civil wars, which had arisen in rapid succession among the invaders and conquerors of that part of South America, gave countenance to this impression. The pretended ringleaders were therefore committed to prison; and the irritated general, being desirous of making a salutary example, to preserve discipline among his troops, ordered that the heads of the criminals should be cut off. The riot being quelled, and more correct information having convinced Don Garcia that the quarrel had been accidental, the severe sentence was revoked.[37] Of the treatment which he then suffered, Ercilla complains bitterly in his poem. He states that he was actually taken to a public place, there to be beheaded by sentence of a young and hasty general[38]; nay, that he had been already upon the scaffold, and had stretched out his neck for the axe, whilst he was only guilty of having unsheathed his sword, which he never drew without being most clearly in the right.[39] The historian of Don Garcia Hurtado de Mendoza, on the other side, pretends that he had been justly condemned by the general, a person, in the opinion of his panegyrist, to whom, by confession of all, no blame could attach, of an exceedingly mild and humane disposition[40], endowed with great equanimity, an acute intellect, and a fine memory, a perfect Christian, of marvellous prudence and activity, no gambler, a zealous restorer of discipline, highly abstemious, never tasting wine, and, to crown all, constantly keeping in hand his rosary to tell his beads.[41] He, moreover, affirms that our poet was indebted to Don Garcia for many favours; but that he hated Ortigosa, the general's secretary, whom he taxed with cowardice and incompetency for his office.[42] It is impossible, and would be foreign to our present purpose, to settle this question. If Ercilla's testimony in his own case ought to be little attended to, the adulatory style of Don Garcia's eulogiser renders his assertions and opinions no less liable to suspicion and unworthy of credit.
Though the sentence of death passed upon Don Alonso was revoked, he had to undergo a long imprisonment, which terminated, as we are informed, in his being banished. We are at a loss how to reconcile this statement with his own assertion, that he was, nevertheless, present at the several sieges and engagements which took place in those countries after the accident of which mention has been made. Not long after, he left Chili in disgust, without having been duly rewarded for his services. This fact appears to contradict Suarez de Figueroa, who says that he was under many obligations to Don Garcia[43]; but what these obligations were the historian has not stated; and, as has been observed by the writer of Ercilla's life prefixed to the edition of the Araucana of 1776 (p. 22.), it is evident from the narration of that prejudiced author, that in a distribution of rewards, which took place under the general, our poet received none.
A new field of exertion seemed now opened to the martial bard. A spirit of dissension and civil strife had prevailed among the conquerors of Peru ever since their establishment in those regions, where, to borrow the expression of the chief historian of Spanish America, "there had occurred frequent instances of disloyalty and disobedience, cruel murders, and various other crimes, two of the king's lieutenants having been deprived of their authority and imprisoned; the tribunals having been reduced to utter insignificance; the power of the crown and justice usurped and trampled upon; and five civil wars had taken place, in which men became furiously enraged against each other, and fought with inhuman ferocity, till ultimately the prince prevailed."[44] One of the most famous "tyrants" of those times (for such was the appellation bestowed by the Spaniards upon those who usurped the royal authority) was Lope de Aguirre, a native of Guipuzcoa, who, having been sent upon an expedition to quell some Indians, raised the standard of revolt against the Spanish commanders, and ruled for a time over the provinces of Venezuela. Of his extraordinary cruelties much has been said, and they are still preserved by tradition, though, perhaps, with that exaggeration of blame which constantly attaches to the memory of an unsuccessful rebel. In the style of the age, Ercilla compares him to Herod and Nero[45]; he having caused his own daughter to be put to death. But before our poet had been able to reach the scene of this civil war, the usurper had been defeated, taken, and executed. Nothing now remained for him to do, as the country was peaceable. He therefore determined to return to Europe, which at that time, however, a long and painful illness prevented. Having at length recovered, he left the American continent, proceeded to the Terceiras, and thence to Spain. At this period (1562), his age being only twenty-nine years, he was in the full and active vigour of life, and had lost none of that spirit which impelled him to enterprise and discovery. He accordingly had scarcely returned to his native country, when the restless energy of his mind sent him forth upon new travels. He visited France, Italy, Germany, Silesia, Moravia, and Pannonia.[46] Having gone back to Spain, he married, at Madrid, Doña Maria de Bazan, a damsel of rank, whose mother held a place at court as lady of the bedchamber to the Spanish queen. The manner in which he speaks of his marriage is quaint and singular: he represents himself to have been carried away by Bellona, in a dream, over a widely extended and flowery meadow, where, while he was intent upon devoting himself to amorous songs, he felt an invincible curiosity to be informed of the names of the beautiful damsels who inhabited that region, especially of one of them, who was such that he suddenly lay prostrate at her feet. She was of tender age, yet she showed a maturity of judgment and talent much above her time of life. While the poet felt compelled to gaze upon her, and while entranced and captivated by the contemplation of her beauty, he anxiously wished to know her name, he saw at her feet the motto, or inscription, "This is Doña Maria, a branch of the stem of Bazan."
Though the emperor and queen of Spain had stood sponsors to the happy pair ]Note 8.] Ercilla does not appear to have obtained any rewards or promotion. The emperor of Germany, Maximilian II., however, appointed him his chambellan, a distinction which did little to better his fortune. In 1580, he lived in Madrid, poor and neglected, and accordingly complaining of the disregard with which his services both at court and in the camp had been treated. The stream of fortune (he says) ran constantly against him: he was now in a state of perfect destitution and abandonment, yet he had the consciousness of having merited, by a long course of honourable service, the just recompence which was withheld from him; a consciousness which is itself a. reward, of which the man of rectitude and honour can never be deprived by external circumstances.[47]
The following anecdote is recorded respecting Ercilla at this time:—Having waited to pay his court to the king, and wishing to speak to his majesty, he felt so disconcerted that he could not find words to declare the nature of his requests; and the king being well aware of the temper of the man who was before him, and sure that his timidity arose from the respect he bore to royalty, told him—"Don Alonso, address me by writing." So Ercilla did (says the author from whom this story has been taken[48]), and the king granted his request.
What the nature of this request was it is impossible to ascertain, because Ercilla constantly complains of his having been totally neglected and forgotten. The anecdote, moreover, seems doubtful. Though a soldier, Don Alonso was not a blunt one: he had been brought up at court, nay, within the precincts of the palace, and as a youthful attendant on the person of that prince, whom now he is represented to have looked upon with such feelings of reverential terror. On the other hand, the account is not entirely devoid of probability, and if not true, is, at least, well imagined. The gloomy and stem disposition of Philip appears to have struck even his confidential servants with a sort of respect bordering upon fear; and the notions of the divine attributes of royalty were then carried to the most extravagant lengths by the Spaniards; a feeling which can be traced in the Spanish writers down to a very recent period, and which has only disappeared in consequence of the late revolutions in the Peninsula.
The last years of Ercilla's life were spent in obscurity. The disappointments he had met with engendered a spirit of gloomy devotion, to which his countrymen were, in those days, peculiarly liable.[49] His morals in his juvenile years had been loose, as is proved by the circumstance of his having had a numerous illegitimate offspring. He now bitterly repented of his frailties; and lamented that he had devoted the best years of his life to worldly pursuits and vanities.[50] The year of his death is not known. In 1596 he was still alive, and is said to have been engaged in writing a poem to commemorate the exploits of Don Alvaro Bazan, marquis of Santa Cruz, the bravest and most fortunate of the Spanish naval commanders. This work, if it ever existed, has been lost; and Ercilla is only known in the literary world by his poem La Araucana, and by a few lines printed in the Parnaso Español[51], which, though they were highly extolled by Lope de Vega, certainly do no credit to his poetical powers.
Respecting Ercilla's personal character we possess little information. He appears to have been brave, active, and clever, of an adventurous disposition, impatient of control, restless and querulous. That he, like most of the literary men of Spain, was shamefully neglected by his own countrymen, is an incontrovertible fact. In his account of the Indian war, and of his own share in the events of it, he shows himself to have been actuated by a more liberal spirit, towards the aboriginal natives, than was evinced by the generality of his fellow-soldiers and fellow-writers. That this arose from his discontent has been malignantly asserted by his enemies, but without sufficient evidence. The execution of Caupolican, the Indian general, which he so indignantly condemns, was a fact of glaring and atrocious injustice, though, unfortunately, of a class by no means uncommon, not only in the annals of Spanish warfare in those regions, but in the history of all conquests; where the assertion of independence has been held and treated as rebellion, and punishment the more severely inflicted in proportion as the right to inflict it was more doubtful or untenable. But as the name of Ercilla belongs rather to the literary than to the political history of Spain, the qualities of his poetry demand our attention in preference to the actions of his life.
The Araucana, though often quoted, is little known out of Spain. No English version of it has been published, but it is stated in an article in the Quarterly Review[52], that there exists one in manuscript from the pen of Mr. Boyd, known as one of the English translators of Dante. The writer of Ercilla's life, in the French Biographie Universelle, speaks of a French translation by M. Langlès, also unpublished. We are not aware that either the Italians or the Germans, the latter of whom have latterly directed their attention to Castilian poetry, possess any complete translation of that Spanish poem.
Voltaire was the first, amongst the French, who called the attention of his countrymen to the Araucana. In his very indifferent Essay upon Epic Poetry, he praises the speech of Colocolo in the 2d canto, which he places above that of Nestor in the first book of the Iliad, and says that the remainder of the work is as barbarous as the nations of which it treats.[53] Of the excellence of the speech so praised (without meaning to enter into a comparison with Homer) no doubt can exist, and the judgment passed upon it by Voltaire deserves the more to be relied upon, as, according to Bouterwek's acute remark[54], he was a better judge of rhetorical than of poetical excellence. The unqualified condemnation of the rest of the poem cannot, indeed, be assented to; for, though the Araucana is far from being a work of first-rate merit, yet it contains some manly beauties, which Voltaire's notions of poetry rendered him unable to perceive. [Note 9.] In an article of Moreri's Dictionnaire we find a more just though still a severe criticism of Ercilla's poem. Latterly the writer in the Biographic Universelle already quoted has expressed a more favourable opinion of the Araucana, and has perhaps erred on the other side. [Note 10.]