Portugal's Age of Letters
The first half of the sixteenth century was a period of lively movement in Portuguese literature. The thrill of geographic discovery, the growth of wealth through trade, the rising influence of Italy, a gathering of humanists at Coimbra and Lisbon, and the encouragement of a culture-loving court all joined to produce a flourishing and seething age, which reached its peak with the publication of the Lusiads (1572) by Portugal's greatest poet, Camoes. In these years a noisy struggle was fought between the "old school," represented by Gil Vicente, who prized native themes and forms, and the men of the sixteenth century (the book's text says "fifteenth," evidently a slip), who under the leadership of Sa de Miranda eagerly followed classical models and the masters of Italy.
For thirty-four years (1502-1536) Gil Vicente, called the "Shakespeare of Portugal," ruled the Portuguese stage with his simple plays, and the court smilingly expected him to turn each event in the lives of its kings into a play. When the king quarreled with the pope, Gil was allowed to satirize the papal government so freely that Aleandro, watching one of Vicente's critical plays in Brussels, wrote in his notes: "I thought I was in the middle of Saxony listening to Luther." This prolific dramatist wrote sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Portuguese and sometimes in both, seasoning the mixture with touches of Italian, French and rustic church Latin. Like Shakespeare's plays, his works sometimes pause so that the actors can sing the audience a charming lyric. Like Shakespeare too he was actor, playwright and stage designer, and, to put full weight on the scale, he was counted one of the best goldsmiths of his age.
Francisco Sa de Miranda returned in 1524 from six years in Italy and brought with him the Renaissance's burning enthusiasm for the classics. Like Ronsard and the Pleiade in France, and like Spenser and Sidney in England, he held that national literature must be given depth and grandeur by following the themes, meters and other features of classical style. Like Du Bellay he counted Petrarch among the great classics and recommended the sonnet to his countrymen. Like Jodelle he wrote the first Portuguese tragedy in the classical manner (1550), and before 1527 he published the first Portuguese prose comedy in classical form.
His friend Bernardim Ribeiro wrote pastoral poems in the manner of Virgil and, like Tasso, lived a life of suffering and disappointment. His love for a lady of the court raised a scandal and he was banished, but was later pardoned and favored by the king; he died insane (1552).
Historians of the Indies
A school of Portuguese chroniclers recorded the victories of the world's explorers. Gaspar Correia traveled to India, became one of Albuquerque's secretaries, was convicted of treachery, and was killed at Malacca in 1565. In the course of his strenuous life he wrote in eight volumes the History of the Conquest of India by the Portuguese, which he himself called "a brief summary." Fernao Lopes spent half of an average human lifetime traveling in the East, and toiled twenty years to finish his History of the Discovery and Conquest of India by the Portuguese. Joao de Barros served forty years in various offices at the India House in Lisbon, and (unlike his predecessors, whom he unjustly blamed) never made a great fortune for himself in that time. He had access to all the documents and registers of the company, and from these sources composed a detailed history under the short title Asia, later called the Decades because three of its four stout volumes each described events spanning ten years. In order, accuracy and clarity it can be compared with any reputable history of that age except those of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, though the proud Portuguese may not accept that exception and call Barros the "Livy of Portugal."
Castilian and the Spanish Style
By now the Castilian dialect had become the literary language of Spain. Galician, Valencian, Catalan and Andalusian lived on in everyday speech, and Galician became Portuguese. The use of Castilian as the official language of state and church under Ferdinand, Isabella and Cardinal Ximenes naturally gave it prestige and superiority, and from then on the firm sound of Castilian has carried Spanish literature on its manly shoulders. Some writers of this period developed a blameworthy passion for verbal ornament; Antonio de Guevara produced a sample of artificial prose heavy with rhetoric, and the English translation of his Dial of Princes (1529) by Lord Berners prepared the ground for the affected style of John Lyly's Euphues and for the tasteless word-play of Shakespeare's earliest comedies.
Romance, War and Garcilaso
Spanish literature was the song of religion, love and war. The passion for reading chivalric romances reached such a pitch that in 1555 the Cortes of Spain urged a law to stop the printing of such tales, and such a law was in fact enforced in Spanish America; had it been enforced in Spain too, the world might have been deprived of a masterpiece like Don Quixote. One romance that escaped the ravages of events is Diana (1542, "Diana in the Snare of Love" in the book's wording) by Jorge de Montemayor, written in imitation of the Arcadia (1504) of the Italian-Spanish poet Sannazaro and in turn imitated by Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Written in a mixture of verse and prose, it is one of thousands of examples of Italian influence on Spanish literature, and here once more the conquered conquered the conqueror. Juan Boscan translated Castiglione's Courtier in a prose worthy of the original and followed the advice of the Venetian poet Navagero by promoting the sonnet in Spain.
His friend and colleague Garcilaso de la Vega took the new poetic form in Castilian to its height almost without a pause. Like many Spanish writers of the time he came of a noble family; his father was ambassador of Ferdinand and Isabella in Rome. Garcilaso was born at Toledo (1503) and entered military service. In 1532, in the driving of the Turks from Vienna, he distinguished himself by valor; in 1535, at the siege of Tunis, he was twice badly wounded; some months later he joined Charles V's fruitless campaign into Provence. At Frejus he volunteered to lead an assault on a strong fortress and was the first to climb its wall, but died a few days later of a blow to the head. He was thirty-three. One of his thirty-seven sonnets (the book's count), dedicated to his friend Boscan, sounds again the sorrowful note heard in every war. In outline: a curse, wider than ever, has spread its wings over our time; what has gone before keeps changing shape only to grow worse; each of us has felt the revulsion of war, one war after another, mixed with exile, danger and fear; each of us is weary to the marrow of finding our blood running at the end of a lance, or counting the risk of death as the reason we live. Some have lost all they had, and every comfort has gone, even the name of house, family, wife and keepsake. And what is the use of all this, a little fame or the gratitude of a nation or a place in history? Some day a book will be written, and then we shall see its result.
Thousands of books kept his memory alive out of love, but he could not see any of them. The historians placed his death at the head of the important events of the time; his poems were printed in small hand-sized volumes and carried in the pockets of Spanish soldiers to a dozen different lands; Spanish composers turned his lyrics into madrigals for performance with the vihuela; and playwrights made plays of his pastoral songs.
The Spanish Stage and the New World
The theater in Spain was in its neglected youth, not knowing that it would soon rival the brilliant Elizabethan theater. One-act comedies, farcical satires and scenes from popular novels were performed by wandering players in public squares or at the counters of inns, and sometimes in the residences of nobles and the royal palace. Lope de Rueda, who succeeded Gil Vicente as supplier of plays and manager of troupes of actors, won fame.
Historians were few. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo was appointed by Charles V as chronicler of the New World and wrote a thick, disordered book titled the General and Natural History of the Indies (1535), and did his duty in his way. During the forty years he lived in Spanish America he acquired great wealth from gold mining, and for that reason he showed intense dislike of the Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, in which Bartolome de las Casas described the cruel exploitation of native slaves in the American mines. Las Casas sailed in 1502 (the book says with Columbus), became bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, and spent nearly his whole life serving and caring for the Indians. In his writings, addressed to the Spanish government, he describes how the oppressed natives died in droves under the hard conditions and exhausting labor imposed by European settlers. These Indians were used, in their tropical climate, to light work and a plain diet. They had never mined gold, for example, but were content to separate grains of gold from the soil, and used the product of their labor only for ornaments. Las Casas calculated that the Indian population of America fell in thirty-eight years from 12,000,000 (an estimate that was doubtless far too high) to 14,000. Missionaries of the Dominican order and the Jesuits joined Las Casas in protest against the enslavement of the Indians, and Queen Isabella repeatedly condemned the practice. Ferdinand and Cardinal Ximenes made half-humane laws about employing the natives in heavy labor, but when these decent men were plunged in the waves of European politics most of their orders and laws were forgotten.
A brief dispute arose over the conquest of Mexico. Francisco Lopez de Gomara wrote the account of that raid in a style that suited Cortes; but Bernal Diaz del Castillo objected and composed the True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1568). While paying proper tribute to Cortes's victory, he accused him of claiming all the honors and spoils of war and leaving nothing for stout soldiers like Bernal. It is a fascinating book, full of the zest of adventure and the joy of victory, and also full of honest wonder and respect for the wealth and splendor of Aztec civilization in Mexico: "When I looked at the scenes around me, I thought in my heart that this was a true paradise on earth." And he adds: "All of it is now destroyed."
Diego Hurtado de Mendoza
The most complete history of Spain and the most famous Spanish novel of this period are ascribed to one author. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza was born at Granada eleven years after its conquest by Ferdinand. His father had won much honor in the siege and after the city fell was appointed governor. Mendoza studied at Salamanca, Bologna and Padua, and mastered Latin, Greek and Arabic letters, philosophy and law. He collected classical texts with the persistence of a Renaissance prince, and when Suleiman the Magnificent obliged him to ask a reward for services rendered to the Sublime Porte, Diego asked only for a few Greek manuscripts. As counselor to Charles V he rose high, and served as the emperor's private envoy in Venice, Rome and the Council of Trent. Once, after delivering a sharp message from Charles to Pope Paul and being rebuked by the pope, he answered with all the pride of a Spanish aristocrat, in outline: "I am a soldier and my father was a soldier before me; it is my duty to carry out the orders of my crowned lord, and while I give the vicar of Christ the respect due to him, I have no fear of that sacred office; I am the ambassador of the king of Spain and, as his special representative, I am safe from any harm, even the displeasure of that holy office."
Lazarillo de Tormes
For a long time public opinion held that Mendoza, by writing The Life and Adventures of Lazarillo de Tormes, had first made a ragged rogue the hero of a European story; but recent research doubts this, and considers it wrong to ascribe the work to a writer like Mendoza, who in rank of family stood below only the royal family and had been brought up from childhood for service in the church, especially as the clergy are so satirized in this story that the Inquisition forbade a reprint unless its insults to churchmen were removed. Lazarillo, a child without a protector, hired to guide a blind beggar, learns in the street the arts of pickpocketing and petty theft; then, in the service of such masters as a priest, a friar, a constable (the book's titles are rendered loosely here), and a seller of indulgences, he commits greater offenses. Even when the young thief has turned out a cunning rascal, he is amazed at the tricks that wandering pardoners used to sell their goods: "I must confess that I too, like many people, was long deceived by my master, and thought him a miracle of holiness." This lively story introduced the picaresque style (from picaro, rogue) into the novel and brought countless imitations in European literature, the best known of which is Gil Blas (1715-1735) by Alain Lesage.
Mendoza was driven from the court of Philip II for drawing his sword after a quarrel, and retired to Granada. For a while he wrote very free and daring poems, which were not allowed to be printed in his lifetime; then he wrote of the revolt of the Moors (1568-1570) in a book titled the History of the War of Granada, so impartial and so fair to the Moors that no publisher dared print it until 1610, and then only in part. Mendoza took Sallust as his model and tried to equal him, and borrowed one or two striking subjects from Tacitus; on the whole his book is the first history in Spain to go beyond shallow chronicle and flattering propaganda and to examine historical facts with philosophical understanding and literary expression. Mendoza died in 1575 at seventy-two. He was one of the most complete figures of an age full of complete men.
A Closing Word on Half a Century of Letters
In these hurried pages the author's conscience, racing against time, keeps warning the sharp pen that, like an impatient traveler, it does nothing more than scratch the surface. How many publishers, teachers, scholars, patrons of art, poets, novelists and daring rebels, in half a century of effort and struggle, brought into being a literature that we have passed over so briefly in this narrow space! How many manuscripts are unmentioned, how many nations forgotten, and how many geniuses, deemed immortal in their time, whose lives here pass in a single line! There is no help for it; the ink of the pen dries up, and while it flows we must use its drops to give the reader a picture, though misty, of men and women who, for a moment free of the cares of war and theology, worshipped the various forms of beauty and art as they worshipped the mirages of truth and power: men and women who gave their inner thoughts and feelings shape in buildings, statues and paintings, blended logic and music, and raised literature to the point where it became the speaking voice of each nation and could cast the spirit of each age into forms so harmonious and pleasing that the passing of time cherishes them, carries them through a thousand different calamities, and hands them on to future generations as a precious racial inheritance.