Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564
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mold. In nineteenth-century France the two streams met, the
half-truths merged, content married form, and French prose became
supreme.
VII. WYATT AND SURREY
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Not as a flood, but as a river flowing through many outlets to the
sea, the influence of Italy passed through France and reached England.
The scholarship of one generation inspired the literature of the next;
the divine revelation of ancient Greece and Rome became the Bible of
the Renaissance. In 1486 the plays of Plautus were staged in Italy,
and soon thereafter at the rival courts of Francis I and Henry VIII.
In 1508 Bibbiena's Calandra began the vernacular classic comedy in
Italy; in 1552 Jodelle's Cleopatre captive began the vernacular
classic tragedy in France; in 1553 Nicholas Udall produced the first
English comedy in classical form. Ralph Roister Doister, said a
critic, "smelt of Plautus"; `063541 it did; but it smelled of
England too, and of that robust humor that Shakespeare would serve
to the groundlings at the Elizabethan theaters.
The Italian influence appeared brightest in the poetry of the
Tudor reigns. The medieval style survived in such pretty ballads as
The Not-browne Mayd (1521); but when the poets who basked in the sun
of young Henry VIII took to verse their ideal and model were
Petrarch and his Canzoniere. Just a year before Elizabeth's
accession, Richard Tottel, a London printer, published a
Miscellany in which the poems of two distinguished courtiers
revealed the triumph of Petrarch over Chaucer, of classic form over
medieval exuberance. Sir Thomas Wyatt, as a diplomat in the service of
the King, made many a trip to France and Italy, and brought back
some Italians to help him civilize his friends. Like a good
Renaissance cortigiano, he burned his fingers in love's fire: he
was, said tradition, one of Anne Boleyn's early lovers, and he was
briefly imprisoned when she was sent to the Tower. `063542 Meanwhile
he translated Petrarch's sonnets, and was the first to compress
English verse into that compact form.
When Wyatt died of a fever at thirty-nine (1542), another romantic
figure at Henry's court, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, caught the lyre
from his hands. Surrey chanted the beauties of spring, reproved
reluctant lasses, and vowed eternal fidelity to each in turn. He
took to nocturnal excesses in London, served a term in jail for
challenging to a duel, was summoned to trial for eating meat in
Lent, broke some windows with his playful crossbow, was again
arrested, again released, and fought gallantly for England in
France. Returning, he toyed too audibly with the idea of becoming king
of England. He was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, but
was let off with decapitation (1547).
Poetry was an incidental ornament in this strenuous life. Surrey
translated some books of the Aeneid, introduced blank verse into
English literature, and gave the sonnet the form that Shakespeare
was to use. Perhaps foreseeing that the paths of undue glory might
lead to the block, he addressed to a Roman poet a wistful idyl of
rustic routine and peace:
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Martial, the things that do attain
The happy life be these, I find:
The riches left, not got with pain;
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind;
The equal friend; no grudge, no strife;
No change of rule nor governance;
Without disease the healthful life;
The household of continuance;
The mean diet, no delicate fare;
True wisdom joined with simpleness;
The night discharged of all care,
Where wine the wit may not oppress;
The faithful wife, without debate;
Such sleep as may beguile the night;
Contented with thine own estate,
Ne wish for death, ne fear his might.
VIII. HANS SACHS
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The mind of Germany, in the century that followed Luther's Theses,
was lost in the hundred years' debate that prepared the Thirty
Years' War. After 1530 the publication of ancient classics almost
ceased; in general, fewer books were issued; they were replaced by a
torrent of controversial pamphlets. Thomas Murner, a Franciscan monk
with an acid pen, scourged everybody with a chain of booklets about
rascals or dolts- Schmelmenzunft ( Guild of Rogues ),
Narrenbeschworung ( Muster of Fools )... all proliferated from
Brant's Narrenschiff. *06066 Many of the fools lashed by Murner were
churchmen, and he was at first mistaken for a Lutheran; but then he
celebrated Luther as "a savage bloodhound, a senseless, foolish,
blasphemous renegade." `063543 Henry VIII sent him L100.
Sebastian Franck was of finer metal. The Reformation found him a
priest in Augsburg; he hailed it as a brave and needed revolt, and
became a Lutheran minister (1525). Three years later he married
Ottilie Beham, whose brothers were Anabaptists; he developed
sympathy for this persecuted sect, condemned Lutheran intolerance, was
expelled from Strasbourg, and made a living by boiling soap in Ulm. He
ridiculed the determination of religious orthodoxy by the German
dukes, noting that "if one prince dies and his successor brings in
another creed, this at once becomes God's Word." `063544 "Mad zeal
possesses all men today, that we should believe... that God is ours
alone, that there is no heaven, faith, spirit, Christ, but in our
sect." His own faith was a universalist theism that closed no doors.
"My heart is alien to none. I have my brothers among the Turks,
Papists, Jews, and all peoples." `063545 He aspired to "a free,
unsectarian... Christianity, bound to no outer thing," not even to the
Bible. `063546 Shocked by sentiments so unbecoming to his century, Ulm
banished him in its turn. He found work as a printer in Basel, and
died there in honest penury (1542).
German poetry and drama were now so immersed in theology that they
ceased to be arts and became weapons of war. In this strife any
jargon, coarseness, and obscenity were held legitimate; except for
folk songs and hymns, poetry disappeared in a fusillade of poisoned
rhymes. The lavishly staged religious dramas of the fifteenth
century passed out of public taste, and were succeeded by popular
farces lampooning Luther or the popes.
Now and then a man rose above the fury to see life whole. If Hans
Sachs had obeyed the magistrates of Nuremberg he would have remained a
shoemaker; for when, without securing the civic imprimatur, he
published a rhyming history of the Tower of Babel, they suppressed the
book, assured him that poetry was obviously not his line, and bade him
stick to his last. `063547 Yet Hans had some rights, for he had passed
through the usual stages to become a Meistersinger, and the anomaly of
his being a cobbler and a poet fades when we note that the guild of
weavers and shoemakers to which he belonged regularly practiced choral
song, and gave public concerts thrice a year. For this guild, and at
any other opportunity, Sachs wrote songs and plays as assiduously as
if he were mouthing nails.
We must think of him not as a great poet, but as a sane and cheerful
voice in a century of hate. His basic interest was in simple people,
not in geniuses; his plays were almost always about such people; and
even God, in these dramas, is a benevolent commoner, who talks like
some parson of the neighborhood. While most writers peppered their
pages with bitterness, vulgarity, or ribaldry, Hans portrayed and
exalted the virtues of affection, duty, piety, marital fidelity,
parental and filial love. His first published poems (1516) proposed
"to promote the praise and glory of God," and "to help his fellow
creatures to a life of penitence"; `063548 and this religious spirit
warmed his writings to the end. He turned half the Bible into rhyme,
using Luther's translation as a text. He saluted Luther as "the
Nightingale of Wittenberg," who would cleanse religion and restore
morality.
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Awake! awake! the day is near,
And in the woods a song I hear.
It is the glorious nightingale;
Her music rings on hill and dale.
The night falls into Occident,
The day springs up in Orient,
The dawn comes and sets alight
The gloomy clouds of parting night. `063549
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Now Sachs became the bard of the Reformation, satirizing the
faults of Catholics with doggerel tenacity. He wrote plays about
rascally monks, and traced the origin of their tribe to the Devil;
he issued burlesques and farces which showed, for example, a priest
seducing a girl or saying Mass while drunk; in 1558 he published a
History in Rhyme of the Popess Joanna - a fable which most Protestant
preachers accepted as history. But Hans satirized Lutherans too,
denouncing their lives as scandalously contrary to their creed:
"With your flesh-eating, your uproars, your abuse of priests, your
quarreling, mocking, insulting, and all your other improper
behavior, you Lutherans have brought the Gospel into great
contempt." `063550 He joined a hundred others in mourning the
commercialism and immorality of the age.
All in all, and discounting Wagner's idealization, Hans Sachs may
typify the bluff and crude but kindly German who, at least in the
south, must have been in the majority. We picture him happy and
melodious for forty years in his home and his poetry. When his first
wife died (1560) he married, at sixty-eight, a pretty woman of
twenty-seven, and survived even this trial. There is something to be
said for an age and a city in which a cobbler could become a humanist,
a poet, and a musician, acquire and use a large library, learn Greek
literature and philosophy, write 6,000 poems, and live in reasonable
health and happiness to die at the age of eighty-two.
IX. THE IBERIAN MUSE: 1515-55
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This was a lively time in the literature of Portugal. The exciting
stimulus of the explorations, the spreading wealth of expanding
commerce, the influence of Italy, the humanists at Coimbra and Lisbon,
the patronage of a cultivated court, joined in an efflorescence that
would soon culminate in the Lusiads (1572) of Camoens. A merry
battle raged between the Eschola Velha - Old School- of Gil
Vicente, who cherished native themes and forms, and Os
Quinhentistas - The Men of the Fifteenth (our Sixteenth) Century-
who followed Sa de Miranda in enthusiasm for Italian and classic modes
and styles. For thirty-four years (1502-36) Gil Vicente, "the
Portuguese Shakespeare," dominated the theater with his simple
autos, or acts; the court smiled upon him, and expected him to
celebrate every royal event with a play; and when the king was
quarreling with the pope Gil was allowed to satirize the papacy with
such freedom that Aleander, seeing one of Vicente's plays in Brussels,
"thought I was in mid-Saxony listening to Luther." `063551 The fertile
dramatist wrote sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in Portuguese,
sometimes in both, with scraps of Italian and French, Church Latin and
peasant slang, thrown in. Often the action of the piece was
interrupted, as in Shakespeare, with lyrics that crept into the hearts
of the people. Like Shakespeare, Gil was actor as well as
playwright; he was stage manager as well, and directed the settings.
For good measure he was one of the best goldsmiths of the age.
In 1524 Francisco Sa de Miranda returned from a six years' stay in
Italy, and brought with him the classical fever of the Renaissance.
Like Ronsard and the Pleiade in France, like Spenser and Sidney in
England, he proposed to dignify the national literature by modeling
its subjects, meters, and style on classical lines; like Joachim du
Bellay, he included Petrarch among the classics, and introduced the
sonnet to his countrymen; like Jodelle he wrote the first classical
tragedy in his native tongue (1550); and he had already (1527) written
the first Portuguese prose comedy in classic form. His friend
Bernardim Ribeiro composed bucolic poetry in the style of Virgil,
and lived a tragedy in the manner of Tasso: he made such a stir with
his passion for a lady of the court that he was banished; he was
forgiven and restored to royal favor, and died insane (1552).
A school of colorful historians recorded the triumphs of the
explorers. Caspar Correa went out to India, rose to be one of
Albuquerque's secretaries, denounced official corruption, and was
murdered in Malacca in 1565. Amid this active life he wrote in eight
volumes what he called "a brief summary" of the Portuguese conquest of
India ( Lendas da India ), full of the color of that expansive era.
Fernao Lopes de Castanheda traveled for half a lifetime in the East,
and labored for twenty years on his Historia do descobrimento e
conquista da India pelos Portuguezes. Joao de Barros served in
several administrative capacities at India House in Lisbon for forty
years, and disgraced his predecessors by amassing no fortune. He had
access to all the archives, and gathered them into a history which
he called simply Asia, but which acquired the name of Decades
because three of its four huge volumes covered periods of some ten
years each. In order, accuracy, and clarity it bears comparison with
any contemporary historical composition except the works of
Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The proud nation would have rejected the
exceptions, and gave Barros the title of "the Portuguese Livy."
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The Castilian tongue had now become the literary language of
Spain. Galician, Valencian, Catalonian, Andalusian dialects survived
in the speech of the people, and Galician became Portuguese; but the
use of Castilian as the language of state and Church under
Ferdinand, Isabella, and Ximenes gave that dialect an insuperable
prestige, and from their time to ours its masculine sonority has
carried the literature of Spain. An infatuation with language appeared
in some writers of this age. Antonio de Guevara set an example of
linguistic conceits and rhetorical flourishes, and the translation
of his Reloj de principes ( Dial of Princes, 1529) by Lord
Berners helped to mold the euphuism of John Lyly's Euphues, and
the silly wordplay of Shakespeare's early comedies.
Spanish literature sang of religion, love, and war. The passion
for romances of chivalry reached such a height that in 1555 the Cortes
recommended that they be prohibited by law; such a decree was actually
issued in Spanish America; had it been enforced in Spain we might have
missed Don Quixote. One of the romances spared by the curate in
the purification of the Knight's library was the Diana enamorata
(1542) of Jorge de Montemayor; it imitated the Arcadia (1504) of the
Spanish-Italian poet Sannazaro, and was itself imitated by Sir
Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590). Montemayor's prose-and-poetry
romance was one of a thousand instances of Italian influence on
Spanish literature; here again the conquered conquered the conquerors.
Juan Boscan translated Castiglione's Cortigiano into prose quite
worthy of the original, and accepted the suggestion of the Venetian
poet Navagero to popularize the sonnet form in Spain.
His friend Garcilaso de la Vega almost at once brought the form to
perfection in Castilian. Like so many Spanish writers of this
period, he came of high lineage; his father was ambassador of
Ferdinand and Isabella at Rome. Born at Toledo in 1503, Garcilaso
was early dedicated to arms. In 1532 he distinguished himself in the
repulse of the Turks from Vienna; in 1535 he was twice severely
wounded in the siege of Tunis; a few months later he shared in Charles
V's futile campaign in Provence. At Frejus he volunteered to lead an
attack upon an obstructive castle; he was the first to mount the wall;
he received a blow on the head from which he died a few days later,
aged thirty-three. One of the thirty-seven sonnets which he bequeathed
to his friend Boscan struck a note that has echoed in every war:
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And now larger than ever lies the curse
On this our time; and all that went before
Keeps altering its face from bad to worse;
And each of us has felt the touch of war-
War after war, and exile, dangers, fear-
And each of us is weary to the core
Of seeing his own blood along a spear
And being alive because it missed its aim.
Some folks have lost their goods and all their gear,
And everything is gone, even the name
Of house and home and wife and memory.
And what's the use of it? A little fame?
The nation's thanks? A place in history?
One day they'll write a book, and then we'll see. `063552
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He could not see, but a thousand books commemorated him fondly.
Historians recorded his death among the leading events of the time.
His poems were printed in handy volumes which were carried in the
pockets of Spanish soldiers into a dozen lands. Spanish lutenists
put his lyrics to music as madrigals for the vihuela, and dramatists
turned his eclogues into plays.
The Spanish drama marked time, and could not know that it would soon
rival the Elizabethan. One-act comedies, farcical satires, or episodes
from popular romances were performed by strolling players in a
public square or the corrale - yard- of an inn, sometimes at a
princely seat or royal court. Lope de Rueda, who succeeded Gil Vicente
as chief provider of autos for such troupes, made his fame- and gave
us a word- with his bobos, clowns.
Historians abounded. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo was appointed
historiographer of the New World by Charles V, and acquitted himself
indifferently well with a voluminous and ill-ordered Historia general
y natural de las Indias Occidentales (1535). During forty years of
residence in Spanish America he grew rich from mining gold, and he
resented the Brevisima relacion de la destruycion de las Indias
(1539 f.), in which Bartolome de las Casas exposed the merciless
exploitation of native slave labor in the American mines. Las Casas
sailed with Columbus in 1502, became Bishop of Chiapa in Mexico, and
gave nearly all his life to the cause of the Indians. In Memorials
addressed to the Spanish government he described the rapidity with
which the natives were dying under the arduous conditions of work
imposed upon them by the settlers. The Indians had been accustomed
by their warm climate and simple diet to only casual labor; they had
not mined gold, but had been content to derive it from the surface
of the earth or the beds of shallow streams, and used it only as an
ornament. Las Casas calculated that the native population of the
"Indies" had been reduced from 12,000,000 (doubtless too high a guess)
to 14,000 in thirty-eight years. `063553 Dominican and Jesuit
missionaries joined with Las Casas in protesting against Indian
slavery, `063554 and Isabella repeatedly denounced it. `063555
Ferdinand and Ximenes prescribed semi-humane conditions for the
conscription of Indian labor, `063556 but while these gentlemen were
engrossed in European politics their instructions for the treatment of
the natives were mostly ignored.
A minor debate concerned the conquest of Mexico. Francisco Lopez
de Gomara gave a very Cortesian account of that rape; Bernal Diaz
del Castillo, in protest, composed (1568 f.) his Historia verdadera
de la conquista de la Nueva Espana, which, while giving due praise to
Cortes, condemned him for taking all the honors and profits of the
conquest, leaving little for such brave soldiers as Bernal. It is a
fascinating book, full of the lust of action, the joy of victory,
and honest amazement at the wealth and splendor of Aztec Mexico. "When
I beheld the scenes that were around me, I thought within myself
that this was the garden of the world." And then he adds, "All is
destroyed." `063557
The most mature Spanish history and the most famous Spanish novel of
this period have been attributed to the same man. Diego Hurtado de
Mendoza was born at Granada some eleven years after its conquest by
Ferdinand; his father had won laurels in the siege, and had been
made governor of the city after its fall. Educated at Salamanca,
Bologna, and Padua, Mendoza acquired a wide culture in Latin, Greek,
and Arabic, in philosophy and law; he collected classic texts with the
zeal of a Renaissance prince; and when Suleiman the Magnificent bade
him name his reward for certain good offices he had performed for
the Porte, he asked only for some Greek manuscripts. He rose to high
place in the diplomatic service of Charles V at Venice, Rome, and
the Council of Trent. Rebuked by Paul III for conveying some harsh
message from Charles to the Pope, he answered with all the pride of
a Spanish grandee: "I am a cavalier, my father was one before me,
and as such it is my duty to fulfill the commands of my royal
master, without any fear of your Holiness, so long as I observe due
reverence to the vicegerent of Christ. I am minister to the King of
Spain... safe, as his representative, even from your Holiness's
displeasure." `063558
Recent research questions Mendoza's authorship of the first
picaresque novel in European literature- The Life and Adventures of
Lazarillo de Tormes. Though not printed till 1553, it had probably
been written many years before. That a scion of a family only less
noble than the king's should make a thief his hero would be startling;
more so that a man originally intended for the priesthood should
include in his story such sharp satires of the clergy that the
Inquisition forbade any further printing of the book until it had been
expurgated of all offense. `063559 Lazarillo *06067 is a waif who,
as guide to a blind beggar, acquires the tricks of petty larceny,
and rises to higher crimes as servant to a priest, a friar, a
chaplain, a bailiff, a seller of indulgences. Even the worldly wise
young thief is impressed with some of the marvels arranged by the
indulgence peddler in promoting his wares. "I must confess that I,
amongst many others, was deceived at the time, and thought my master a
miracle of sanctity." `063560 This rollicking narrative set the gusto
picaresco, or "style of the rogue," in fiction; it evoked innumerable
imitations, culminating in the most renowned of picaresque romances,
the Gil Blas (1715-35) of Alain Lesage.
Exiled from the court of Philip II for drawing his sword in an