Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 22.djvu/379

 CASTILIAN.] SPAIN 355 ments of lost poems of the juglares, the British cycle (Lancelot, Tristram, Merlin, &c.) is represented almost exclusively by works in prose (compare ROMANCE). Those narratives are known, it is true, only by 15th and 16th century editions in which they have been more or less modified to suit the taste of the time, but it is impossible not to recognize that books such as El Baladro del Sabio Merlin and La Demanda del Sancto Grial (1515) presup- pose a considerable antecedent literature of which they are only the afterglow. The principal French romances of the Hound Table were translated and imitated in Spain and in Portugal as early as the first half of the 14th century at least ; of that there is no doubt. And, even if there was not on this point satisfactory testimony, the prodigious development in Spanish literature of the caba- llerias or "book of chivalry," incontrovertibly derived from fictions of British origin, is proof enough that the Spaniards have at an early date been familiarized with this romance from France. The first book which begins the series of strictly Spanish caballerias is the Amadis de Gaula (i.e., of Wales, not France). We know the Amadis only by the version made about 1480 in four books by Garci Ordonez de Montalvo (the oldest edition extant is dated 1508), but the work in its original form (three books), already widely distributed and celebrated by various Castilian poets from about 1350, must have been composed at the latest in the second third of the 14th century. A few rather vague hints and certain senti- mental considerations lead one to seek for the unknown author of the first Amadis in Portugal, where the romances of the Round Table were even more highly appreciated than in Spain, and where they have exercised a deeper influence on the national literature. To Mont- alvo, however, falls the honour of having preserved the book by republishing it; he only made the mistake of diluting the original text too much and of adding a poor continuation, Las Sergas de Esplandian. Allied to Montalvo's Amadis with its Esplandian appendage are the Don Florisando and the Lisuarte de Grecia, the Amadis de Grecia, the Don Florisel de Niquea, &c., which form what Cervantes called the "Amadis sect." Along with the Amadises range the Palmerines, the most celebrated of which are the Palmerin de Oliva, the Primaleon, and the Palmerin de Inalaterra. None of those caballerias inspired by the Amadis were printed or even written before the 16th century; and they bear in language and style the stamp of that period ; but they cannot be separated from their mediaeval model, the spirit of which they have pre- served intact. Among the caballerias we may also class some narratives belonging to the Carlovingian epic, the Historia del Emperador Carlomagno y de los Doce Pares, a very popular version still reprinted of the French romance of Fierabras, the Espejo de Caballerias, into which has passed a large part of the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo, the Historia de la Beina Sibilla, &c. Poetry The first half of the 15th century, or, what comes of loth almost to the same thing, the reign of John II. of Castile aentury. (1407-1 454), is as regards its literature characterized by three facts (1) by the development of a court poetry, artificial and pretentious ; (2) by the influence of Italian literature on Castilian prose and poetry, the imitation of Boccaccio and Dante, especially of the latter, which intro- duced into Spain a liking for allegory ; and (3) by more assiduous intercourse with antiquity a fuller understand- ing of the Latin writers who had been brought to the front by the Italian renaissance. After the example of the Pro- vencals, whose literary doctrines had made their way into Castile through Portugal and Catalonia, poetry is now styled the arte de trobar. The arte de trobar is strictly "court" poetry, which consists in short pieces of rather complicated versification, love plaints, debates, questions, and repartees, motes with their nlosas, burlesque and satirical songs, a poetry wholly " occasional," and which when separated from its natural environment loses great part of its charm. In order to understand and appreciate those pieces they must be read in the collections made by the poets of the time, and the one must be brought to throw light on the other. The most celebrated cancionero of the 15th century is that compiled for the amusement of his sovereign by Alfonso de Baena (who has not designated him- self a Jew, as has been supposed, the word judino attached to his name in the preface being nothing but indino} ; it is, so to say, the official collection of the poetic court of John II., although it also contains some pieces by poets of earlier date. After Baena's collection may be mentioned the Cancionero de Stuniga, which contains the Castilian poems of the trobadores who followed Alfonso V. of Aragon to Naples. Those cancioneros, consisting of the productions of a society, a group, were succeeded by collections of a more general character in which versifiers of very different periods and localities are jumbled together, the pieces being classed simply according to their type. The earliest Cancionero General is that compiled by Juan Fernandez de Constantina, which appears to have issued from the Valencia press in the very beginning of the 16th century; the second, much better known, was published for the first time at Valencia in 1511 ; its editor was called Fernando del Castillo. The other poetic school of the 15th century, which claims to be specially related to the Italians, had as its leaders Juan de Mena (1411-1456), author of the Coro- nacion and the Labirinto or Las Tredentas (a long poem so called because of the number of stanzas which, accord- ing to the scheme, were to compose it), and the marquis of Santillana, D. Ifiigo Lopez de Mendoza (1398-1458), who in his sonnets was the first to imitate the structure of the Italian endecasillabo. Along with those two, who may be designated poetas, in distinction from the decidores and the trobadores of the cancioneros, must be ranked Francisco Imperial, a Genoese by descent, who also helped to acclimatize in Spain the forms of Italian poetry. The marquis of Santillana occupies a considerable place in the literature of the 15th century, not only by reason of his poems, but quite as much if not more through the support he afforded to all the writers of his time, and the impulse he gave to the study of antiquity and to the labours of translators who at his request turned Virgil, Ovid, Seneca, &c., into Castilian. He himself was not acquainted with Latin ; but the generous efforts he made to stir up his fellow-countrymen to learn it have justly procured him the title of father of Spanish humanism. That he had an extensive knowledge of the national literature and of the literatures of France and Italy he has shown in the preface to his works, which is a sort of ars poetica as well as an historical exposition of the kinds of poetry cultivated in the Middle Ages by the Spaniards and the neighbouring nations. With the exception of the chronicles and some Prose caballerias, the prose of the 15th century contains nothing very striking. The translation of Virgil by Enrique de Villena (died 1434) is very clumsy and shows no advance on the versions of Latin authors made in the previous century ; better worth reading is the Trabajos de Hercules, a whimsical production but with some savour in its style. A curious and amusing book, full of details about Spanish manners, is the Corbacho of the archpriest of Talavera, Alonso Martinez de Toledo, chaplain to King John II. ; the Corbacho belongs to the numerous family of satires against women, and its title ("The Lash" or " Whip") borrowed from a work of Boccaccio's, with which it has otherwise nothing akin, correctly indicates that he has not spared them.