[SN: _The inheritance from the fifteenth century._]
Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454) had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself entirely foreign in origin--being, in truth, little more than an echo of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante, and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French _rhétoriqueurs_. Indeed the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of poetry in the _Gai Saber_ of Provence. The troubadours, when driven from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief _Ars Poetica_ to one of those collections of lyric verse called _Cancioneros_, and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish.
What there was of really Spanish in their verse must be allowed to have been mainly the impoverishment of the original models. The Spaniard has always been recalcitrant to the shackles imposed by complicated and artful forms of verse, and there is a natural tendency in him to drift at all times to his native trochaic assonants of eight syllables. His language, admirable when properly handled for prose, wants the variety of melody required for poetry. Impatience of the difficulties of metre is another name for the want of a due sense of the beauty of form. Indeed it is not by its form that Spanish literature has been distinguished. Given, then, a people who had very little faculty for delicate verse, and a language which wanted both the wealth of the Italian accent and the flexibility of the French, and it is easy to see what was likely to be the end of the Provençal and Petrarchian influence in the Court school. Its poetry, never more than an echo, sank into mechanical verse-making--mostly in eight-syllabled couplets, relieved by a broken line of four. The inborn preference of the Spaniard for loose metres gradually gained the upper hand. No doubt fine verses may be picked out from the bulk of the writings of the troubadour school of Castile. The _rhythmus de contemptu mundi_, known as the _coplas de Manrique_, which has been made known to English readers by Mr Longfellow, is even noble in its rigid gravity. But the merit lies not in the melody of the verse, which soon becomes monotonous. It is in this, that the _coplas_ give us perhaps the finest expression of one side of the Spaniard. They are full of what he himself calls in his own untranslatable word _el desengaño_--that is to say, the melancholy recognition of the hollowness of man’s life, and “the frailty of all things here”--not in puling self-pity, but in manly and pious resignation to fate and necessity.