CHAPTER II

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LOW STATE OF LETTERS ABOUT THE YEAR 1500.--INFLUENCE OF ITALY.-- CONQUESTS OF CHARLES THE FIFTH.--BOSCAN.--NAVAGIERO.--ITALIAN FORMS INTRODUCED INTO SPANISH POETRY.--GARCILASSO DE LA VEGA.--HIS LIFE, WORKS, AND PERMANENT INFLUENCE.

There was, no doubt, a great decay of letters and good taste in Spain during the latter part of the troubled reign of John the Second and the whole of the still more disturbed period when his successor, Henry the Fourth, sat upon the throne of Castile. The Provençal school had passed away, and its imitations in Castilian had not been successful. The earlier Italian influences, less fertile in good results than might have been anticipated, were almost forgotten. The fashion of the court, therefore, in the absence of better or more powerful impulses, ruled over every thing, and a monotonous poetry, full of conceits and artifices, was all that its own artificial character could produce.

Nor was there much improvement in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. The introduction of the art of printing and the revival of a regard for classical antiquity were, indeed, foundations for a national culture such as had not before been laid; while, at the same time, the establishment of the University of Alcalá, by Cardinal Ximenes, and the revival of that of Salamanca, with the labors of such scholars as Peter Martyr, Lucio Marineo, Antonio de Lebrija, and Arias Barbosa, could hardly fail to exercise a favorable influence on the intellectual cultivation, if not on the poetical taste, of the country. Occasionally, as we have seen, proofs of the old energy appeared in such works as the “Celestina” and the “Coplas” of Manrique. The old ballads, too, and the other forms of the early popular poetry, no doubt, maintained their place in the hearts of the common people. But it is not to be concealed, that, among the cultivated classes,--as the Cancioneros and nearly every thing else that came from the press in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella sufficiently prove,--taste was at a very low ebb.

The first impulse to a better state of things came from Italy. In some respects this was unhappy; but there can be little doubt that it was inevitable. The intercourse between Italy and Spain, shortly before the accession of Charles the Fifth, had been much increased, chiefly by the conquest of Naples, but partly by other causes. Regular interchanges of ambassadors took place between the See of Rome and the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, and one of them was a son of the poetical Marquis of Santillana, and another the father of Garcilasso de la Vega. The universities of Italy continued to receive large numbers of Spanish students, who still regarded the means of a generous education at home as inadequate to their wants; and Spanish poets, among whom were Juan de la Enzina and Torres Naharro, resorted there freely, and lived with consideration at Rome and Naples. In the latter city, the old Spanish family of Dávalos--one of whom was the husband of that Vittoria Colonna whose poetry ranks with the Italian classics--were among the chief patrons of letters during their time, and kept alive an intellectual union between the two countries, by which they were equally claimed and on which they reflected equal honor.[752]

[752] Ginguené, Hist. Lit. d’ltalie, Paris, 1812, 8vo, Tom. IV. pp. 87-90; and more fully in Historia de Don Hernando Dávalos, Marques de Pescara, en Anvers, Juan Steelsio, 1558, 12mo;--a curious book, which seems, I think, to have been written before 1546, and was the work of Pedro Valles, an Aragonese. Latassa, Bib. Nueva de Escritores Aragoneses, Zaragossa, Tom. I. 4to, 1798, p. 289.

But besides these individual instances of connection between Spain and Italy, the gravest events were now drawing together the greater interests of the mass of the people in both countries, and fastening their thoughts intently upon each other. Naples, after the treaty of 1503 and the brilliant successes of Gonzalvo de Córdova, was delivered over to Spain, bound hand and foot, and was governed, above a century, by a succession of Spanish viceroys, each accompanied by a train of Spanish officers and dependants, among whom, not unfrequently, we find men of letters and poets, like the Argensolas and Quevedo. When Charles the Fifth ascended the throne, in 1516, it was apparent that he would at once make an effort to extend his political and military power throughout Italy. The tempting plains of Lombardy became, therefore, the theatre of the first great European contest entered into by Spain,--a grand arena, in which, as it proved, much of the fate of Europe, as well as of Italy, was to be decided by two young and passionate monarchs, burning with personal rivalship and the love of glory. In this way, from 1522, when the first war broke out between Francis the First and Charles the Fifth, to the disastrous battle of Pavia, in 1525, we may consider the whole disposable force of Spain to have been transferred to Italy, and subjected, in a remarkable degree, to the influences of Italian culture and civilization.

Nor did the connection between the two countries stop here. In 1527, Rome itself was, for a moment, added to the conquests of the Spanish crown, and the Pope became the prisoner of the Emperor, as the king of France had been before. In 1530, Charles appeared again in Italy, surrounded by a splendid Spanish court, and at the head of a military power that left no doubt of his mastery. He at once crushed the liberties of Florence and restored the aristocracy of the Medici. He made peace with the outraged Pope. By his wisdom and moderation, he confirmed his friendly relations with the other states of Italy; and, as the seal of all his successes, he caused himself, in the presence of whatever was most august in both countries, to be solemnly crowned King of Lombardy and Emperor of the Romans, by the same Pope whom, three years before, he had counted among his captives.[753] Such a state of things necessarily implied a most intimate connection between Spain and Italy; and this connection was maintained down to the abdication of the Emperor, in 1555, and, indeed, long afterwards.[754]

[753] The coronation of Charles V. at Bologna, like most of the other striking events in Spanish history, was brought upon the Spanish theatre. It is circumstantially represented in “Los dos Monarcas de Europa,” by Bartolomé de Salazar y Luna. (Comedias Escogidas, Madrid, 1665, 4to, Tomo XXII.) But the play is quite too extravagant in its claims, both as respects the Emperor’s humiliation and the Pope’s glory, considering that Clement VII. had so lately been the Emperor’s prisoner. As the ceremony is about to begin, a procession of priests enters, chanting,--

In happy hour, let this child of the Church, Her obedient, dutiful son, Come forth to receive, with her holiest rites, The crown which his valor has won.

To which the Emperor is made to reply,--

And in happy hour, let _him_ show his power, His dominion, and glorious might, Who now sees, in the dust, a king faithful and just Surrender, rejoicing, his right.

But such things were common in Spain, and tended to conciliate the favor of the clergy for the theatre.

[754] P. de Sandoval, Hist. del Emperador Carlos V., Amberes, 1681, folio, Lib. XII. to XVIII., but especially the last book.

On the other hand, it should be remembered that Italy was now in a condition to act with all the power of a superior civilization and refinement on this large body of Spaniards, many of them the leading spirits of the Empire, who, by successive wars and negotiations, were thus kept for half a century travelling in Italy and living at Genoa, Milan, and Venice, Florence, Rome, and Naples. The age of Lorenzo de’ Medici was already past, leaving behind it the memorials of Poliziano, Boiardo, Pulci, and Leonardo da Vinci. The age of Leo the Tenth and Clement the Seventh was contemporary, and had brought with it the yet more prevalent influences of Michel Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian, of Machiavelli, of Berni, of Ariosto, of Bembo, and of Sannazaro; the last of whom, it is not unworthy of notice, was himself a descendant of one of those very Spanish families whom the political interests of the two countries had originally carried to Naples. It was, therefore, when Rome and Naples, Florence and the North of Italy, were in the maturity of their glory, as seats of the arts and letters, that no small part of what was most noble and cultivated in Spain was led across the Alps and awakened to a perception of such forms and creations of genius and taste as had not been attempted beyond the Pyrenees, and such as could not fail to produce their full effect on minds excited, like those of the whole Spanish people, by the glorious results of their long struggle against the Moors, and their present magnificent successes both in America and Europe.

Visible traces of the influence of Italian literature might, therefore, from general causes, soon be looked for in the Spanish; but an accident brings them to our notice somewhat earlier, perhaps, than might have been anticipated. Juan Boscan, a patrician of Barcelona, was, as he himself tells us, devoted to poetry from his youth. The city to which he belonged had early been distinguished for the number of Provençal and Catalonian Troubadours who had flourished in it. But Boscan preferred to write in the Castilian; and his defection from his native dialect became, in some sort, the seal of its fate. His earlier efforts, a few of which remain to us, are in the style of the preceding century; but at last, when, from the most distinct accounts we can obtain, he was about twenty-five years old, and when, we are assured, he had been received at court, had served in the army, and had visited foreign countries, he was induced, by an accident, to attempt the proper Italian measures, as they were then practised.[755]

[755] The Dictionary of Torres y Amat contains a short, but sufficient, life of Boscan; and in Sedano, “Parnaso Español,” (Madrid, 1768-78, 12mo, Tom. VIII. p. xxxi.,) there is one somewhat more ample.

He became, at that period, acquainted with Andrea Navagiero, who was sent, in 1524, as ambassador from Venice to Charles the Fifth, and returned home in 1528, carrying with him a dry, but valuable, itinerary, which was afterwards published as an account of his travels. He was a man of learning and a poet, an orator and a statesman of no mean name.[756] While in Spain, he spent, during the year 1526, six months at Granada.[757] “Being with Navagiero there one day,” says Boscan, “and discoursing with him about matters of wit and letters, and especially about the different forms they take in different languages, he asked me why I did not make an experiment in Castilian of sonnets and the other forms of verse used by good Italian authors; and not only spoke to me of it thus slightly, but urged me much to do it. A few days afterwards, I set off for my own home; and whether it were the length and solitariness of the way I know not, but, turning over different things in my mind, I came often back upon what Navagiero had said to me. And thus I began to try this kind of verse. At first, I found it somewhat difficult; for it is of a very artful construction, and in many particulars different from ours. But afterwards it seemed to me,--perhaps from the love we naturally bear to what is our own,--that I began to succeed very well, and so I went on, little by little, with increasing zeal.”[758]

[756] Tiraboschi, Storia della Lett. Italiana, Roma, 1784, 4to, Tom. VII., Parte I. p. 242; Parte II. p. 294; and Parte III. pp. 228-230.

[757] Andrea Navagiero, Il Viaggio fatto in Spagna, etc., Vinegia, 1563, 12mo, ff. 18-30. Bayle gives an article on Navagiero’s life, with discriminating praise of his scholarship and genius.

[758] Letter to the Duquesa de Soma, prefixed to the Second Book of Boscan’s Poems.

This account is interesting and important. It is rare that any one individual has been able to exercise such an influence on the literature of a foreign nation as was exercised by Navagiero. It is still more rare,--indeed, perhaps, wholly unknown, in any case where it may have occurred,--that the precise mode in which it was exercised can be so exactly explained. Boscan tells us not only what he did, but what led him to do it, and how he began his work, which we find him, from this moment, following up, till he devoted himself to it entirely, and wrote in all the favorite Italian measures and forms with boldness and success. He was resisted, but he tells us Garcilasso sustained him; and from this small beginning in a slight conversation with Navagiero at Granada, a new school was introduced into Spanish poetry, which has prevailed in it ever since, and materially influenced its character and destinies.

Boscan felt his success. This we can see from his own account of it. But he made little effort to press his example on others; for he was a man of fortune and consideration, who led a happy life with his family at Barcelona, and hardly cared for popular reputation or influence. Occasionally, we are told, he was seen at court; and at one period he had some charge of the education of that Duke of Alva whose name, in the next reign, became so formidable. But in general he preferred a life of retirement to any of the prizes offered to ambition.

Letters were his amusement. “In what I have written,” he says, “the mere writing was never my object; but rather to solace such faculties as I have, and to go less heavily through certain heavy passages of my life.”[759] The range of his studies, however, was wider than this remark might seem to imply, and wider than was common in Spain at the beginning of the sixteenth century, even among scholars. He translated a tragedy of Euripides, which was licensed to be published, but which never appeared in print, and is, no doubt, lost.[760] On the basis of the “Hero and Leander” of Musæus, and following the example of Bernardo Tasso, he wrote, in the _versi sciolti_, or blank verse, of the Italians, a tale nearly three thousand lines long, which may still be read with pleasure, for the gentle and sweet passages it contains.[761] And in general, throughout his poetry, he shows that he was familiar with the Greek and Latin classics, and imbued, to a considerable degree, with the spirit of antiquity.

[759] Letter to the Duquesa de Soma.

[760] It is mentioned in the permission to publish his works granted to Boscan’s widow, by Charles V., Feb. 18, 1543, and prefixed to the very rare and important edition of his works and those of his friend Garcilasso, published for the first time in the same year, at Barcelona, by Amoros; a small 4to, containing 237 leaves. This edition is said to have been at once counterfeited, and was certainly reprinted not less than six times as early as 1546, three years after its first appearance. In 1553, Alonso de Ulloa, a Spaniard, at Venice, who published many Spanish books there with prefaces of some value by himself, printed it in 18mo, very neatly, and added a few poems to those found in the first edition; particularly one, at the beginning of the volume, entitled “Conversion de Boscan,” religious in its subject, and national in its form. At the end Ulloa puts a few pages of verse, attacking the Italian forms adopted by Boscan; describing what he thus adds as by “an uncertain author.” They are, however, the work of Castillejo, and are found in Obras de Castillejo, Anvers, 1598, 18mo, f. 110, etc.

[761] Góngora, in the first two of his Burlesque Ballads, has made himself merry (Obras, Madrid, 1654, 4to, f. 104, etc.) at the expense of Boscan’s “Leandro.” But he has taken the same freedom with better things.

The Leandro was, I think, the first attempt to introduce blank verse, which was thus brought by Boscan into the poetry of Spain in 1543, as it was a little later into English, from the _versi sciolti_ of the Italians, by Surrey, who called it “a strange meter.” Acuña soon followed in Castilian with other examples of it; but the first really good Spanish blank verse known to me is to be found in the eclogue of “Tirsi” by Francisco de Figueroa, written about half a century after the time of Boscan, and not printed till 1626. The translation of a part of the Odyssey by Perez, in 1553, and the “Sagrada Eratos” of Alonso Carillo Laso de la Vega, which is a paraphrase of the Psalms, printed at Naples in 1657, folio, afford much longer specimens that are generally respectable. But the full rhyme is so easy in Spanish, and the _asonante_ is so much easier, that blank verse, though it has been used from the middle of the sixteenth century, has been little cultivated or favored.

His longest work was a translation of the Italian “Courtier” of Balthazar Castiglione,--the best book on good-breeding, as Dr. Johnson thought two centuries afterwards, that was ever written.[762] Boscan, however, frankly says, that he did not like the business of translating, which he regarded as “a low vanity, beseeming men of little knowledge”; but Garcilasso de la Vega had sent him a copy of the original soon after it was published, and he made this Spanish version of it, he tells us, “at his friend’s earnest request.”[763] Either or both of them may have known its author in the same way Boscan knew Navagiero; for Castiglione was sent as ambassador of Clement the Seventh to Spain in 1525, and remained there till his death, which happened at Toledo, in 1529.

[762] Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. Croker, London, 1831, 8vo, Tom. II. p. 501.

[763] The first edition of it is in black letter, without the name of place or printer, 4to, 140 leaves, and is dated 1549. Another edition appeared as early as 1553; supposed by Antonio to have been the oldest. It is on the Index of 1667, p. 245, for expurgation.

But however this may have been, the Italian original of the Courtier was prepared for the press in Spain and first printed in 1528;[764] soon after which Boscan must have made his translation, though it did not appear till 1540. As a version, it does not profess to be very strict, for Boscan says he thought an exact fidelity to be unworthy of him;[765] but, as a Spanish composition, it is uncommonly flowing and easy. Garcilasso declares that it reads like an original work;[766] and Morales, the historian, says, “The Courtier discourseth not better in Italy, where he was born, than here in Spain, where Boscan hath exhibited him so admirably well.”[767] Perhaps nothing in Castilian prose, of an earlier date, is written in so classical and finished a style as this translation by Boscan.

[764] Ginguené, Hist. Lit. d’Italie, Tom. VII. pp. 544, 550.

[765] “I have no mind,” he says in the Prólogo, “to be so strict in the translation of this book, as to confine myself to give it word for word. On the contrary, if any thing occurs, which sounds well in the original language, and ill in our own, I shall not fail to change it or to suppress it.” Ed. 1549, f. 2.

[766] “Every time I read it,” says Garcilasso in a letter to Doña Gerónima Palova de Almogovar, prefixed to the first edition, “it seems to me as if it had never been written in any other language.” This letter of Garcilasso is very beautiful in point of style.

[767] Morales, Discourse on the Castilian Language, Obras de Oliva, Madrid, 1787, 12mo, Tom. I. p. xli.

With such occupations Boscan filled up his unostentatious life. He published nothing, or very little, and we have no single date to record concerning him. But, from the few facts that can be collected, it seems probable he was born before 1500, and we know that he died as early as 1543; for in that year his works were published at Barcelona, by his widow, under a license from the Emperor Charles the Fifth, with a Preface, in which she says her husband had partly prepared them for the press, because he feared they would be printed from some of the many imperfect copies that had gone into circulation without his consent.

They are divided into four books. The first consists of a small number of poems in what are called _coplas Españolas_, or what he himself elsewhere terms “the Castilian manner.” These are his early efforts, made before his acquaintance with Navagiero. They are _villancicos_, _canciones_, and _coplas_, in the short national verses, and seem as if they might have come out of the old Cancioneros, in which, indeed, two of them are to be found.[768] Their merit is not great; but, amidst their ingenious conceits, there is sometimes a happiness and grace of expression rarely granted to the poets of the same school in that or the preceding century.

[768] Cancionero General, 1535, f. 153.

The second and third books, constituting by far the larger part of the volume, are composed entirely of poems in the Italian measure. They consist of ninety-three sonnets and nine _canzones_; the long poem on Hero and Leander, in blank verse, already mentioned; an elegy and two didactic epistles, in _terza rima_; and a half-narrative, half-allegorical poem, in one hundred and thirty-five octave stanzas. It is not necessary to go beyond such a mere enumeration of the contents of these two books to learn, that, at least so far as their forms are concerned, they have nothing to do with the elder national Castilian poetry. The sonnets and the _canzones_ especially are obvious imitations of Petrarch, as we can see in the case of the two beginning, “Gentil Señora mia,” and “Claros y frescos rios,” which are largely indebted to two of the most beautiful and best-known _canzones_ of the lover of Laura.[769] In most of these poems, however, and amidst a good deal of hardness of manner, a Spanish tone and spirit are perceptible, which rescue them, in a great degree, from the imputation of being copies. Boscan’s colors are here laid on with a bolder hand than those of his Italian master, and there is an absence of that delicate and exact finish, both in language and style, which, however charming in his models, would hardly be possible in the most skilful Spanish imitations.

[769] Petrarca, Vita di Madonna Laura, Canz. 9 and 14. But Boscan’s imitations of them are marred by a good many conceits. Some of his sonnets, however, are free from this fault, and are natural and tender.

The elegy, which is merely entitled “Capitolo,” has more conceits and learning in it than become its subject, and approaches nearer to Boscan’s first manner than any of his later poems. It is addressed to his lady-love; but, notwithstanding its defects, it contains long passages of tenderness and simple beauty that will always be read with pleasure. Of the two epistles, the first is poor and affected; but that addressed to the old statesman, poet, and soldier, Diego de Mendoza, is much in the tone and manner of Horace,--acute, genial, and full of philosophy.

But the most agreeable and original of Boscan’s works is the last of them all,--“The Allegory.” It opens with a gorgeous description of the Court of Love, and with the truly Spanish idea of a corresponding and opposing Court of Jealousy; but almost the whole of the rest consists of an account of the embassy of two messengers from the first of these courts to two ladies of Barcelona who had refused to come beneath its empire, and to persuade whom to submission a speech of the ambassador is given that fills nearly half the poem, and ends it somewhat abruptly. No doubt, the whole was intended as a compliment to the two ladies, in which the story is of little consequence. But it is a pleasing and airy trifle, in which its author has sometimes happily hit the tone of Ariosto, and at other times reminds us of the Island of Love in the “Lusiad,” though Boscan preceded Camoens by many years. Occasionally, too, he has a moral delicacy, more refined than Petrarch’s, though perhaps suggested by that of the great Italian; such a delicacy as he shows in the following stanza, and two or three preceding and following it, in which the ambassador of Love exhorts the two ladies of Barcelona to submit to his authority, by urging on them the happiness of a union founded in a genuine sympathy of tastes and feeling:--

For is it not a happiness most pure, That two fond hearts can thus together melt, And each the other’s sorrows all endure, While still their joys as those of one are felt; Even causeless anger of support secure, And pardons causeless in one spirit dealt; That so their loves, though fickle all and strange, May, in their thousand changes, still together change?[770]

[770] Y no es gusto tambien assi entenderos, Que podays siēpre entrambos conformaros: Entrambos en un punto entrísteceros, Y en otro punto entrambos alegraros: Y juntos sin razon embraueceros, Y sin razon tambien luego amanssaros: Y que os hagan, en fin, vuestros amores Igualmente mudar de mil colores?

Obras de Boscan, Barcelona, 1543, 4to, f. clx.

Boscan might, probably, have done more for the literature of his country than he did. His poetical talents were not, indeed, of the highest order; but he perceived the degradation into which Spanish poetry had fallen, and was persuaded that the way to raise it again was to give it an ideal character and classical forms such as it had not yet known. But to accomplish this, he adopted a standard not formed on the intimations of the national genius. He took for his models foreign masters, who, though more advanced than any he could find at home, were yet entitled to supremacy in no literature but their own, and could never constitute a safe foundation whereon to build a great and permanent school of Spanish poetry. Entire success, therefore, was impossible to him. He was able to establish in Spain the Italian eleven-syllable and iambic versification; the sonnet and _canzone_, as settled by Petrarch; Dante’s _terza rima_;[771] and Boccaccio’s and Ariosto’s flowing octaves;--all in better taste than any thing among the poets of his time and country, and all of them important additions to the forms of verse before known in Spain. But he could go no farther. The original and essential spirit of Italian poetry could no more be transplanted to Castile or Catalonia than to Germany or England.

[771] Pedro Fernandez de Villegas, Archdeacon of Burgos, who, in 1515, published a translation of the “Inferno” of Dante, (see _ante_, p. 409, n.,) says, in his Introduction, that he at first endeavoured to make his version in _terza rima_, “which manner of writing,” he goes on, “is not in use among us, and appeared to me so ungraceful, that I gave it up.” This was about fifteen years before Boscan wrote in it with success; perhaps a little earlier, for it is dedicated to Doña Juana de Aragon, the natural daughter of Ferdinand the Catholic, a lady of much literary cultivation, who died before it was completed.

But whatever were his purposes and plans for the advancement of the literature of his country, Boscan lived long enough to see them fulfilled, so far as they were ever destined to be; for he had a friend who cooperated with him in all of them from the first, and who, with a happier genius, easily surpassed him, and carried the best forms of Italian verse to a height they never afterwards reached in Spanish poetry. This friend was Garcilasso de la Vega, who yet died so young, that Boscan survived him several years.

Garcilasso was descended from an ancient family in the North of Spain, who traced back their ancestry to the age of the Cid, and who, from century to century, had been distinguished by holding some of the highest places in the government of Castile.[772] A poetical tradition says, that one of his forefathers obtained the name of “Vega” or Plain, and the motto of “Ave Maria” for his family arms, from the circumstance, that, during one of the sieges of Granada, he slew outright, before the face of both armies, a Moorish champion who had publicly insulted the Christian faith by dragging a banner inscribed with “Ave Maria” at his horse’s heels,--a tradition faithfully preserved in a fine old ballad, and forming the catastrophe of one of Lope de Vega’s plays.[773] But whether all this be true or not, Garcilasso bore a name honored on both sides of his house; for his mother was daughter and sole heir of Fernan Perez de Guzman, and his father was the ambassador of the Catholic sovereigns at Rome in relation to the troublesome affairs of Naples.

[772] The best life of Garcilasso de la Vega is to be found in the edition of his works, Sevilla, 1580, 8vo, by Fernando de Herrera, the poet. A play, comprising no small part of his adventures, was produced in the Madrid theatre, by Don Gregorio Romero y Larrañaga, in 1840.

[773] The story and the ballad are found in Hita, “Guerras Civiles de Granada,” (Barcelona, 1737, 12mo, Tom. I. cap. 17,) and in Lope de Vega’s “Cerco de Santa Fe” (Comedias, Tom. I., Valladolid, 1604, 4to). But the tradition, I think, is not true. Oviedo directly contradicts it, when giving an account of the family of the poet’s father; and as he knew them, his authority is perhaps decisive. (Quinquagenas, Batalla I. Quin. iii. Diálogo 43, MS.) But, besides this, Lord Holland (Life of Lope, London, 1817, 8vo, Vol. I. p. 2) gives good reasons against the authenticity of the story, which Wiffen (Works of Garcilasso, London, 1823, 8vo, pp. 100 and 384) answers as well as he can, but not effectually. It is really a pity it cannot be made out to be true, it is so poetically appropriate.

He was born at Toledo in 1503, and was educated there till he reached an age suitable for bearing arms. Then, as became his rank and pretensions, he was sent to court, and received his place in the armies that were already gaining so much glory for their country. When he was about twenty-seven years old, he married an Aragonese lady attached to the court of Eleanor, widow of the king of Portugal, who, in 1530, was in Spain on her way to become queen of France. From this time he seems to have been constantly in the wars which the Emperor was carrying on in all directions, and to have been much trusted by him, though his elder brother, Pedro, had been implicated in the troubles of the _Comunidades_, and compelled to escape from Spain as an outlawed rebel.[774]

[774] Sandoval, Hist. del Emperador Carlos V., Lib. V., and Oviedo in the Dialogue referred to in the last note.

In 1532 Garcilasso was at Vienna, and among those who distinguished themselves in the defeat of the Turkish expedition of Soliman, which that great sultan pushed to the very gates of the city. But while he was there, he was himself involved in trouble. He undertook to promote the marriage of one of his nephews with a lady of the Imperial household; and, urging his project against the pleasure of the Empress, not only failed, but was cast into prison on an island in the Danube, where he wrote the melancholy lines on his own desolation and on the beauty of the adjacent country, which pass as the third _Cancion_ in his works.[775] The progress of events, however, not only soon brought his release, but raised him into higher favor than ever. In 1535 he was at the siege of Tunis,--when Charles the Fifth attempted to crush the Barbary powers by a single blow,--and there received two severe wounds, one on his head and the other in his arm.[776] His return to Spain is recorded in an elegy, written at the foot of Mount Ætna, and indicating that he came back by the way of Naples; a city which, from another poem addressed to Boscan, he seems to have visited once before.[777] At any rate, we know, though his present visit to Italy was a short one, that he was there, at some period, long enough to win the personal esteem and regard of Bembo and Tansillo.[778]

[775] Obras de Garcilasso, ed. Herrera, 1580, p. 234, and also p. 239, note.

[776] Soneto 33 and note, ed. Herrera.

[777] Elegía II. and the Epístola, ed. Herrera, p. 378.

[778] Obras, ed. Herrera, p. 18.

The very next year, however,--the last of his short life,--we find him again at the court of the Emperor, and engaged in the disastrous expedition into Provence. The army had already passed through the difficulties and dangers of the siege of Marseilles, and was fortunate enough not to be pursued by the cautious Constable de Montmorenci. But as they approached the town of Frejus, a small castle, on a commanding hill, defended by only fifty of the neighbouring peasantry, offered a serious annoyance to their farther passage. The Emperor ordered the slight obstacle to be swept from his path. Garcilasso, who had now a considerable command, advanced gladly to execute the Imperial requisition. He knew that the eyes of the Emperor, and indeed those of the whole army, were upon him; and, in the true spirit of knighthood, he was the first to mount the wall. But a well-directed stone precipitated him into the ditch beneath. The wound, which was on his head, proved mortal, and he died a few days afterwards, at Nice, in 1536, only thirty-three years old. His fate is recorded by Mariana, Sandoval, and the other national historians, among the important events of the time; and the Emperor, we are told, basely avenged it by putting to death all the survivors of the fifty peasantry, who had done no more than bravely defend their homes against a foreign invader.[779]

[779] Obras, ed. Herrera, p. 15. Sandoval, Hist. de Carlos V., Lib. XXIII. § 12, and Mariana, Historia, ad annum. Çapata, in his “Carlos Famoso,” (Valencia, 1565, 4to, Canto 41,) states the number of the peasants in the tower at thirteen; and says that Don Luis de la Cueva, who executed the Imperial order for their death, wished to save all but one or two. He adds, that Garcilasso was without armour when he scaled the wall of the tower, and that his friends endeavoured to prevent his rashness.

In a life so short and so crowded with cares and adventures we should hardly expect to find leisure for poetry. But, as he describes himself in his third Eclogue, Garcilasso seems to have hurried through the world,

Now seizing on the sword, and now the pen;[780]

[780] Tomando ora la espada, ora la pluma;

a verse afterwards borrowed by Ercilla, and used in his “Araucana.” It is equally applicable to both poets.

so that he still left a small collection of poems, which the faithful widow of Boscan, finding among her husband’s papers, published at the end of his works as a Fourth Book, and has thus rescued what would otherwise probably have been lost. Their character is singular, considering the circumstances under which they were written; for, instead of betraying any of the spirit that governed the main course of their author’s adventurous life and brought him to an early grave, they are remarkable for their gentleness and melancholy, and their best portions are in a pastoral tone breathing the very sweetness of the fabulous ages of Arcadia. When he wrote most of them we have no means of determining with exactness. But with the exception of three or four trifles that appear mingled with other similar trifles in the first book of Boscan’s works, all Garcilasso’s poems are in the Italian forms, which we know were first adopted, with his coöperation, in 1526; so that we must, at any rate, place them in the ten years between this date and that of his death.

They consist of thirty-seven sonnets, five _canzones_, two elegies, an epistle in _versi sciolti_ less grave than the rest of his poetry, and three pastorals; the pastorals constituting more than half of all the verse he wrote. The air of the whole is Italian. He has imitated Petrarch, Bembo, Ariosto, and especially Sannazaro, to whom he has once or twice been indebted for pages together; turning, however, from time to time, reverently to the greater ancient masters, Virgil and Theocritus, and acknowledging their supremacy. Where the Italian tone most prevails, something of the poetical spirit which should sustain him is lost. But, after all, Garcilasso was a poet of no common genius. We see it sometimes even in the strictest of his imitations; but it reveals itself much more distinctly when, as in the first Eclogue, he uses as servants the masters to whom he elsewhere devotes himself, and writes only like a Spaniard, warm with the peculiar national spirit of his country.

This first Eclogue is, in truth, the best of his works. It is beautiful in the simplicity of its structure, and beautiful in its poetical execution. It was probably written at Naples. It opens with an address to the father of the famous Duke of Alva, then viceroy of that principality, calling upon him, in the most artless manner, to listen to the complaints of two shepherds, the first mourning the faithlessness of a mistress, and the other the death of one. Salicio, who represents Garcilasso, then begins; and when he has entirely finished, but not before, he is answered by Nemoroso, whose name indicates that he represents Boscan.[781] The whole closes naturally and gracefully with a description of the approach of evening. It is, therefore, not properly a dialogue, any more than the eighth Eclogue of Virgil. On the contrary, except the lines at the opening and the conclusion, it might be regarded as two separate elegies, in which the pastoral tone is uncommonly well preserved, and each of which, by its divisions and arrangements, is made to resemble an Italian _canzone_. An air of freshness and even originality is thus given to the structure of the entire pastoral, while, at the same time, the melancholy, but glowing, passion that breathes through it renders it in a high degree poetical.

[781] I am aware that Herrera, in his notes to the poetry of Garcilasso, says that Garcilasso intended to represent Don Antonio de Fonseca under the name of Nemoroso. But nearly every body else supposes he meant that name for Boscan, taking it from _Bosque_ and _Nemus_; a very obvious conceit. Among the rest, Cervantes is of this opinion. Don Quixote, Parte II. c. 67.

In the first part, where Salicio laments the unfaithfulness of his mistress, there is a happy preservation of the air of pastoral life by a constant, and yet not forced, allusion to natural scenery and rural objects, as in the following passage:--

For thee, the silence of the shady wood I loved; for thee, the secret mountain-top, Which dwells apart, glad in its solitude; For thee, I loved the verdant grass, the wind That breathed so fresh and cool, the lily pale, The blushing rose, and all the fragrant treasures Of the opening spring! But, O! how far From all I thought, from all I trusted, amidst Loving scenes like these, was that dark falsehood That lay hid within thy treacherous heart![782]

[782] Por ti el silencio de la selva umbrosa, Por ti la esquividad y apartimiento Del solitario monte me agradaba: Por ti la verde hierba, el fresco viento, El blanco lirio y colorada rosa, Y dulce primavera deseaba. Ay! quanto me engañaba, Ay! quan diferente era, Y quan de otra manera Lo que en tu falso pecho se escondia.

Obras de Garcilasso de la Vega, ed. Azara, Madrid, 1765, 12mo, p. 5.

Something of the same idea and turn of phrase occurs in Mendoza’s Epistle to Boscan, which will be noticed hereafter.

The other division of the Eclogue contains passages that remind us both of Milton’s “Lycidas” and of the ancients whom Milton imitated. Thus, in the following lines, where the opening idea is taken from a well-known passage in the Odyssey, the conclusion is not unworthy of the thought that precedes it, and adds a new charm to what so many poets since Homer had rendered familiar:[783]--

[783] Odyss. T. 518-524. Moschus, too, has it, and Virgil; but it is more to the present purpose to say, that it is found in Boscan’s “Leandro.”

And as the nightingale that hides herself Amidst the sheltering leaves, and sorrows there, Because the unfeeling hind, with cruel craft, Hath stole away her unfledged offspring dear,-- Stole them from out the nest that was their home, While she was absent from the bough she loved,-- And pours her grief in sweetest melody, Filling the air with passionate complaint, Amidst the silence of the gloomy night, Calling on heaven and heaven’s pure stars To witness her great wrong;--so I am yielded up To misery, and mourn, in vain, that Death Should thrust his hand into my inmost heart, And bear away, as from its nest and home, The love I cherished with unceasing care![784]

[784] Qual suele el ruyseñor, con triste canto, Quexarse, entre las hojas encondido, Del duro laborador, que cautamente Le despojo su caro y dulce nido De los tiernos hijuelos, entre tanto Que del amado ramo estaua ausente; Y aquel dolor que siente, Con diferencia tanta, Por la dulce garganta Despide, y a su canto el ayre suena; Y la callada noche no refrena Su lamentable oficio y sus querellas, Trayendo de su pena El cielo por testigo y las estrellas:

Desta manera suelto yo la rienda A mi dolor, y anssi me quejo en vano De la dureza de la muerte ayrada: Ella en mi coraçon metyó la mano, Y d’ alli me lleuó mi dulçe prenda, Que aquel era su nido y su morada.

Obras de Garcilasso de la Vega, ed. Azara, 1765, p. 14.

Garcilasso’s versification is uncommonly sweet, and well suited to the tender and sad character of his poetry. In his second Eclogue, he has tried the singular experiment of making the rhyme often, not between the ends of two lines, but between the end of one and the middle of the next. It was not, however, successful. Cervantes has imitated it, and so have one or two others; but wherever the rhyme is quite obvious, the effect is not good, and where it is little noticed, the lines take rather the character of blank verse.[785] In general, however, Garcilasso’s harmony can hardly be improved; at least, not without injuring his versification in particulars yet more important.

[785] For example,-- Albanio, si tu mal comuni_cáras_ Con otro, que pen_sáras_, que tu _péna_ Juzgara como _agéna_, o que este fuego, etc.

I know of no earlier instance of this precise rhyme, which is quite different from the lawless rhymes that sometimes broke the verses of the Minnesingers and Troubadours. Cervantes used it, nearly a century afterwards, in his “Cancion de Grisóstomo,” (Don Quixote, Parte I. c. 14,) and Pellicer, in his commentary on the passage, regards Cervantes as the inventor of it. Perhaps Garcilasso’s rhymes had escaped all notice; for they are not the subject of remark by his learned commentators. In English, instances of this peculiarity may be found occasionally amidst the riotous waste of rhymes in Southey’s “Curse of Kehama,” and in Italian they occur in Alfieri’s “Saul,” Act III. sc. 4. I do not remember to have seen them again in Spanish except in some _décimas_ of Pedro de Salas, printed in 1638, and in the second _jornada_ of the “Pretendiente al Reves” of Tirso de Molina, 1634. No doubt they occur elsewhere, but they are rare, I think.

His poems had a great success from the moment they appeared. There was a grace and an elegance about them of which Boscan may in part have set the example, but which Boscan was never able to reach. The Spaniards who came back from Rome and Naples were delighted to find at home what had so much charmed them in their campaigns and wanderings in Italy; and Garcilasso’s poems were proudly reprinted wherever the Spanish arms and influence extended. They received, too, other honors. In less than half a century from their first appearance, Francisco Sanchez, commonly called “El Brocense,” the most learned Spaniard of his age, added a commentary to them, which has still some value. A little later, Herrera, the lyric poet, published them, with a series of notes yet more ample, in which, amidst much that is useless, interesting details may be found, for which he was indebted to Puerto Carrero, the poet’s son-in-law. And early in the next century, Tamayo de Vargas again encumbered the whole with a new mass of unprofitable learning.[786] Such distinctions, however, constituted, even when they were fresh, little of Garcilasso’s real glory, which rested on the safer foundations of a genuine and general regard. His poetry, from the first, sunk deep into the hearts of his countrymen. His sonnets were heard everywhere; his eclogues were acted like popular dramas.[787] The greatest geniuses of his nation express for him a reverence they show to none of their predecessors. Lope de Vega imitates him in every possible way; Cervantes praises him more than he does any other poet, and cites him oftener.[788] And thus Garcilasso has come down to us enjoying a general national admiration, such as is given to hardly any other Spanish poet, and to none that lived before his time.

[786] Francisco Sanchez--who was named at home El Brocense, because he was born at Las Brozas in Estremadura, but is known elsewhere as Sanctius, the author of the “Minerva,” and other works of learning--published his edition of Garcilasso at Salamanca, 1574, 18mo; a modest work, which has been printed often since. This was followed at Seville, in 1580, by the elaborate edition of Herrera, in 8vo, filling nearly seven hundred pages, chiefly with its commentary, which is so cumbersome, that it has never been reprinted, though it contains a good deal important, both to the history of Garcilasso, and to the elucidation of the earlier Spanish literature. Tamayo de Vargas was not satisfied with either of them, and published a commentary of his own at Madrid in 1622, 18mo, but it is of little worth. Perhaps the most agreeable edition of Garcilasso is one published, without its editor’s name, in 1765, by the Chevalier Joseph Nicolas de Azara; long the ambassador of Spain at Rome, and at the head of what was most distinguished in the intellectual society of that capital. In English, Garcilasso was made known by J. H. Wiffen, who, in 1823, published at London, in 8vo, a translation of all his works, prefixing a Life and an Essay on Spanish Poetry; but the translation is constrained, and fails in the harmony that so much distinguishes the original, and the dissertation is heavy and not always accurate in its statement of facts.

[787] Don Quixote, (Parte II. c. 58,) after leaving the Duke and Duchess, finds a party about to represent one of Garcilasso’s Eclogues, at a sort of _fête champêtre_.

[788] I notice that the allusions to Garcilasso by Cervantes are chiefly in the latter part of his life; namely, in the second part of his Don Quixote, in his Comedias, his Novelas, and his “Persiles y Sigismunda,” as if his admiration were the result of his matured judgment. More than once he calls him “the prince of Spanish poets”; but this title, which can be traced back to Herrera, and has been continued down to our own times, has, perhaps, rarely been taken literally.

That it would have been better for himself and for the literature of his country, if he had drawn more from the elements of the earlier national character, and imitated less the great Italian masters he justly admired, can hardly be doubted. It would have given a freer and more generous movement to his poetical genius, and opened to him a range of subjects and forms of composition, from which, by rejecting the example of the national poets that had gone before him, he excluded himself.[789] But he deliberately decided otherwise; and his great success, added to that of Boscan, introduced into Spain an Italian school of poetry which has been an important part of Spanish literature ever since.[790]

[789] How decidedly Garcilasso rejected the Spanish poetry written before his time can be seen, not only by his own example, but by his letter prefixed to Boscan’s translation of Castiglione, where he says that he holds it to be a great benefit to the Spanish language to translate into it things really worthy to be read; “for,” he adds, “I know not what ill luck has always followed us, but hardly any body has written any thing in our tongue worthy of that trouble.” It may be noted, on the other hand, that scarcely a word or phrase used by Garcilasso has ceased to be accounted pure Castilian;--a remark that can be extended, I think, to no writer so early. His language lives as he does, and, in no small degree, _because_ his success has consecrated it. The word _desbañar_, in his second Eclogue, is, perhaps, the only exception to this remark.

[790] Eleven years after the publication of the works of Boscan and Garcilasso, Hernando de Hozes, in the Preface to his “Triumfos de Petrarca,” (Medina del Campo, 1554, 4to,) says, with much truth: “Since Garcilasso de la Vega and Juan Boscan introduced Tuscan measures into our Spanish language, every thing earlier, written or translated, in the forms of verse then used in Spain, has so much lost reputation, that few now care to read it, though, as we all know, some of it is of great value.” If this opinion had continued to prevail, Spanish literature would not have become what it now is.

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