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Short Histories of the Literatures of the World

Edited by Edmund Gosse

A HISTORY OF
SPANISH LITERATURE

BY

JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY

C. DE LA REAL ACADEMIA ESPAÑOLA

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1921

Copyright, 1898,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

Spanish literature, in its broadest sense, might include writings in every tongue existing within the Spanish dominions; it might, at all events, include the four chief languages of Spain. Asturian and Galician both possess literatures which in their recent developments are artificial. Basque, the spoiled child of philologers, has not added greatly to the sum of the world's delight; and even if it had, I should be incapable of undertaking a task which would belong of right to experts like Mr. Wentworth Webster, M. Jules Vinson, and Professor Schuchardt. Catalan is so singularly rich and varied that it might well deserve separate treatment: its inclusion here would be as unjustifiable as the inclusion of Provençal in a work dealing with French literature. For the purposes of this book, minor varieties are neglected, and Spanish literature is taken as referring solely to Castilian—the speech of Juan Ruiz, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Quevedo, and Calderón.

At the close of the last century, Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers raised a hubbub by asking two questions in the Encyclopédie Méthodique:—"Mais que doit-on à l'Espagne? Et depuis deux siècles, depuis quatre, depuis six, qu'a-t elle fait pour l'Europe?" I have attempted an answer in this volume. The introductory chapter has been written to remind readers that the great figures of the Silver Age—Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian—were Spaniards as well as Romans. It further aims at tracing the stream of literature from its Roman fount to the channels of the Gothic period; at defining the limits of Arabic and Hebrew influence on Spanish letters; at refuting the theory which assumes the existence of immemorial romances, and at explaining the interaction between Spanish on the one side and Provençal and French on the other. It has been thought that this treatment saves much digression.

Spanish literature, like our own, takes its root in French and in Italian soil; in the anonymous epics, in the fableaux, as in Dante, Petrarch, and the Cinque Cento poets. Excessive patriotism leads men of all lands to magnify their literary history; yet it may be claimed for Spain, as for England, that she has used her models without compromising her originality, absorbing here, annexing there, and finally dominating her first masters. But Spain's victorious course, splendid as it was in letters, arts, and arms, was comparatively brief. The heroic age of her literature extends over some hundred and fifty years, from the accession of Carlos Quinto to the death of Felipe IV. This period has been treated, as it deserves, at greater length than any other. The need of compression, confronting me at every page, has compelled the omission of many writers. I can only plead that I have used my discretion impartially, and I trust that no really representative figure will be found missing.

My debts to predecessors will be gathered from the bibliographical appendix. I owe a very special acknowledgment to my friend Sr. D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, the most eminent of Spanish scholars and critics. If I have sometimes dissented from him, I have done so with much hesitation, believing that any independent view is better than the mechanical repetition of authoritative verdicts. I have to thank Mr. Gosse for the great care with which he has read the proofs; and to Mr. Henley, whose interest in all that touches Spain is of long standing, I am indebted for much suggestive criticism. For advice on some points of detail, I am obliged to Sr. D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal, to Sr. D. Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, and to Sr. D. Rafael Altamira y Crevea.

CONTENTS

A HISTORY OF
SPANISH LITERATURE

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY

The most ancient monuments of Castilian literature can be referred to no time later than the twelfth century, and they have been dated earlier with some plausibility. As with men of Spanish stock, so with their letters: the national idiosyncrasy is emphatic—almost violent. French literature is certainly more exquisite, more brilliant; English is loftier and more varied; but in the capital qualities of originality, force, truth, and humour, the Castilian finds no superior. The Basques, who have survived innumerable onsets (among them, the ridicule of Rabelais and the irony of Cervantes), are held by some to be representatives of the Stone-age folk who peopled the east, north-east, and south of Spain. This notion is based mainly upon the fact that all true Basque names for cutting instruments are derived from the word aitz (flint). Howbeit, the Basques vaunt no literary history in the true sense. The Leloaren Cantua (Song of Lelo) has been accepted as a contemporary hymn written in celebration of a Basque triumph over Augustus. Its date is uncertain, and its refrain of "Lelo" seems a distorted reminiscence of the Arabic catchword Lā ilāh illā 'llāh; but the Leloaren Cantua is assuredly no older than the sixteenth century.

A second performance in this sort is the Altobiskarko Cantua (Song of Altobiskar). Altobiskar is a hill near Roncesvalles, where the Basques are said to have defeated Charlemagne; and the song commemorates the victory. Written in a rhythm without fellow in the Basque metres, it contains names like Roland and Ganelon, which are in themselves proofs of French origin; but, as it has been widely received as genuine, the facts concerning it must be told. First written in French (circa 1833) by François Eugène Garay de Monglave, it was translated into very indifferent Basque by a native of Espelette named Louis Duhalde, then a student in Paris. The too-renowned Altobiskarko Cantua is therefore a simple hoax: one might as well attribute Rule Britannia to Boadicea. The conquerors of Roncesvalles wrote no triumphing song: three centuries later the losers immortalised their own overthrow in the Chanson de Roland, where the disaster is credited to the Arabs, and the Basques are merely mentioned by the way. Early in the twelfth century there was written a Latin Chronicle ascribed to Archbishop Turpin, an historical personage who ruled the see of Rheims some two hundred years before his false Chronicle was written. The opening chapters of this fictitious history are probably due to an anonymous Spanish monk cloistered at Santiago de Compostela; and it is barely possible that this late source was utilised by such modern Basques as José María Goizcueta, who retouched and "restored" the Altobiskarko Cantua in ignorant good faith.

However that may prove, no existing Basque song is much more than three hundred years old. One single Basque of genius, the Chancellor Pero López de Ayala, shines a portent in the literature of the fourteenth century; and even so, he writes in Castilian. He stands alone, isolated from his race. The oldest Basque book, well named as Linguæ Vasconum Primitiæ, is a collection of exceedingly minor verse by Bernard Dechepare, curé of Saint-Michel, near Saint-Jean Pied de Port; and its date is modern (1545). Pedro de Axular is the first Basque who shows any originality in his native tongue; and, characteristically enough, he deals with religious matters. Though he lived at Sare, in the Basses Pyrénées, he was a Spaniard from Navarre; and he flourished in the seventeenth century (1643). It is true that a small knot of second-class Basque—the epic poet Ercilla y Zúñiga, and the fabulist Iriarte—figure in Castilian literature; but the Basque glories are to be sought in other field—in such heroic personages as Ignacio Loyola, and his mightier disciple Francisco Xavier. Setting aside devotional and didactic works, mostly translated from other tongues, Basque literature is chiefly oral, and has but a formal connection with the history of Spanish letters. Within narrow geographical limits the Basque language still thrives, and on each slope of the Pyrenees holds its own against forces apparently irresistible. But its vitality exceeds its reproductive force: it survives but does not multiply. Whatever the former influence of Basque on Castilian—an influence never great—it has now ceased; while Castilian daily tends to supplant (or, at least, to supplement) Basque. Spain's later invaders—Iberians, Kelts, Phœnicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Alani, Suevi, Goths, and Arabs—have left but paltry traces on the prevailing form of Spanish speech, which derives from Latin by a descent more obvious, though not a whit more direct, than the descent of French. So frail is the partition which divides the Latin mother from her noblest daughter, that late in the sixteenth century Fernando Pérez de Oliva wrote a treatise that was at once Latin and Spanish: a thing intelligible in either tongue and futile in both, though held for praiseworthy in an age when the best poets chose to string lines into a polyglot rosary, without any distinction save that of antic dexterity.

For our purpose, the dawn of literature in Spain begins with the Roman conquest. In colonies like Pax Augusta (Badajoz), Cæsar Augusta (Zaragoza), and Emerita Augusta (Mérida), the Roman influence was strengthened by the intermarriage of Roman soldiers with Spanish women. All over Spain there arose the odiosa cantio, as St. Augustine calls it, of Spanish children learning Latin; and every school formed a fresh centre of Latin authority. With their laws, the conquerors imposed their speech upon the broken tribes; and these, in turn, invaded the capital of Latin politics and letters. The breath of Spanish genius informs the Latinity of the Silver Age. Augustus himself had named his Spanish freedman, Gaius Julius Hyginus, the Chief Keeper of the Palatine Library. Spanish literary aptitude, showing stronger in the prodigious learning of the Elder Seneca, matures in the altisonant rhetoric and violent colouring of the Younger, in Lucan's declamatory eloquence and metallic music, in Martial's unblushing humour and brutal cynicism, in Quintilian's luminous judgment and wise sententiousness.

All these display in germ the characteristic points of strength and weakness which were to be developed in the evolution of Spanish literature; and their influence on letters was matched by their countrymen's authority on affairs. The Spaniard Balbus was the first barbarian to reach the Consulship, and to receive the honour of a public triumph; the Spaniard Trajan was the first barbarian named Emperor, the first Emperor to make the Tigris the eastern boundary of his dominion, and the only Emperor whose ashes were allowed to rest within the Roman city-walls. And the victory of the vanquished was complete when the Spaniard Hadrian, the author of the famous verses—

"Animula vagula blandula,

Hospes comesque corporis,

Quæ nunc abibis in loca,

Pallidula rigida nudula,

Nec, ut soles, dabis jocos?"—

himself an exquisite in art and in letters—became the master of the world. Gibbon declares with justice that the happiest epoch in mankind's history is "that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus"; and the Spaniard, accounting Marcus Aurelius as a son of Córdoba, vaunts with reasonable pride, that of those eighty perfect, golden years, three-score at least were passed beneath the sceptre of the Spanish Cæsars.

Withal, individual success apart, the Spanish utterance of Latin teased the finer ear. Cicero ridiculed the accent—aliquid pingue—of even the more lettered Spaniards who reached Rome; Martial, retired to his native Bilbilis, shuddered lest he might let fall a local idiom; and Quintilian, a sterner purist than a very Roman, frowned at the intrusion of his native provincialisms upon the everyday talk of the capital. In Rome incorrections of speech were found where least expected. That Catullus should jeer at Arrius—the forerunner of a London type—in the matter of aspirates is natural enough; but even Augustus distressed the nice grammarian. A fortiori, Hadrian was taunted with his Spanish solecisms. Innovation won the day. The century between Livy and Tacitus shows differences of style inexplicable by the easy theory of varieties of temperament; and the two centuries dividing Tacitus from St. Augustine are marked by changes still more striking. This is but another illustration of the old maxim, that as the speed of falling bodies increases with distance, so literary decadences increase with time.

As in Italy and Africa, so in Spain. The statelier sermo urbanus yielded to the sermo plebeius. Spanish soldiers had discovered "the fatal secret of empire, that emperors could be made elsewhere than at Rome"; no less fatal was the discovery that Latin might be spoken without regard for Roman models. As the power of classic forms waned, that of ecclesiastical examples grew. Church Latin of the fourth century shines at its best in the verse of the Christian poet, the Spaniard Prudentius: with him the classical rhythms persist—as survivals. He clutches at, rather than grasps, the Roman verse tradition, and, though he has no rhyming stanzas, he verges on rhyme in such performances as his Hymnus ad Galli Cantum. Throughout the noblest period of Roman poetry, soldiers, sailors, and illiterates had, in the versus saturnius, preserved a native rhythmical system not quantitative but accentual; and this vulgar metrical method was to outlive its fashionable rival. It is doubtful whether the quantitative prosody, brought from Greece by literary dandies, ever flourished without the circle of professional men of letters. It is indisputable that the imported metrical rules, depending on the power of vowels and the position of consonants, were gradually superseded by looser laws of syllabic quantity wherein accent and tonic stress were the main factors.

When the empire fell, Spain became the easy prey of northern barbarians, who held the country by the sword, and intermarried but little with its people. To the Goths Spain owes nothing but eclipse and ruin. No books, no inscriptions of Gothic origin survive; the Gongoristic letters ascribed to King Sisebut are not his work, and it is doubtful if the Goths bequeathed more than a few words to the Spanish vocabulary. The defeat of Roderic by Tarik and Mūsa laid Spain open to the Arab rush. National sentiment was unborn. Witiza and Roderic were regarded by Spaniards as men in Italy and Africa regarded Totila and Galimar. The clergy were alienated from their Gothic rulers. Gothic favourites were appointed to non-existent dioceses carrying huge revenues; a single Goth held two sees simultaneously; and, by way of balance, Toledo was misgoverned by two rival Gothic bishops. Harassed by a severe penal code, the Jew hailed the invading Arabs as a kindred, oriental, circumcised race; and, with the heathen slaves, they went over to the conquerors. So obscure is the history of the ensuing years that it has been said that the one thing certain is Roderic's name. Not less certain is it that, within a brief space, almost the entire peninsula was subdued. The more warlike Spaniards,

"Patient of toil, serene among alarms,

Inflexible in faith, invincible in arms,"

foregathered with Pelayo by the Cave of Covadonga, near Oviedo, among the Pyrenean chines, which they held against the forces of the Berber Alkamah and the renegade Archbishop, Don Opas. "Confident in the strength of their mountains," says Gibbon, these highlanders "were the last who submitted to the arms of Rome, and the first who threw off the yoke of the Arabs." While on the Asturian hillsides the spirit of Spanish nationality was thus nurtured amid convulsions, the less hardy inhabitants of the south accepted their defeat. The few who embraced Islamism were despised as Muladíes; the many, adopting all save the religion of their masters, were called Muzárabes, just as, during the march of the reconquest, Moors similarly placed in Christian provinces were dubbed Mudéjares.

The literary traditions of Seneca, Lucan, and their brethren, passed through the hands of mediocrities like Pomponius Mela and Columella, to be delivered to Gaius Vettius Aquilinus Juvencus, who gave a rendering of the gospels, wherein the Virgilian hexameter is aped with a certain provincial vigour. Minor poets, not lacking in marmoreal grace, survive in Baron Hübner's Corpus Inscriptionum Latinorum. Among the breed of learned churchmen shines the name of St. Damasus, first of Spanish popes, who shows all his race's zeal in heresy-hunting and in fostering monkery. The saponaceous eloquence that earned him the name of Auriscalpius matronarum ("the Ladies' Ear-tickler") is forgotten; but he deserves remembrance because of his achievement as an epigraphist, and because he moved his friend, St. Jerome, to translate the Bible. To him succeeds Hosius of Córdoba, the mentor of Constantine, the champion of Athanasian orthodoxy, and the presiding bishop at the Council of Nicæa, to whom is attributed the incorporation in the Nicene Creed of that momentous clause, "Genitum non factum, consubstantialem Patri."

Prudentius follows next, with that savour of the terrible and agonising which marks the Spagnoletto school of art; but to all his strength and sternness he adds a sweeter, tenderer tone. At once a Christian, a Spaniard, and a Roman, to Prudentius his birthplace is ever felix Tarraco (he came from Tarragona); and he thrills with pride when he boasts that Cæsar Augusta gave his Mother-Church most martyrs. Yet, Christian though he be, the imperial spirit in him fires at the thought of the multitudinous tribes welded into a single people, and he plainly tells you that a Roman citizen is as far above the brute barbarian as man is above beast. Priscillian and his fellow-sufferer Latrocinius, the first martyrs slain by Christianity set in office, were both clerks of singular accomplishment. As disciple of St. Augustine, and comrade of St. Jerome, Orosius would be remembered, even were he not the earliest historian of the world. Like Prudentius, Orosius blends the passion of universal empire with the fervour of local sentiment. Good, haughty Spaniard as he is, he enregisters the battles that his fathers gave for freedom; he ranks Numancia's name only below that of the world-mother, Rome; and his heart softens towards the blind barbarians, their faces turned towards the light. Cold, austere, and even a trifle cynical as he is, Orosius' pulses throb at memory of Cæsar; and he glows on thinking that, a citizen of no mean city, he ranges the world under Roman jurisdiction. And this vast union of diverse races, all speaking one single tongue, all recognising one universal law, Orosius calls by the new name of Romania.

Licinianus follows, the Bishop of Cartagena and the correspondent of St. Gregory the Great. A prouder and more illustrious figure is that of St. Isidore of Seville—"beatus et lumen noster Isidorus." Originality is not Isidore's distinction, and the Latin verses which pass under his name are of doubtful authenticity. But his encyclopædic learning is amazing, and gives him place beside Cassiodorus, Boëtius, and Martianus Capella, among the greatest teachers of the West. St. Braulius, Bishop of Zaragoza, lives as the editor of his master Isidore's posthumous writings, and as the author of a hymn to that national saint, Millán. Nor should we omit the names of St. Eugenius, a realist versifier of the day, and of St. Valerius, who had all the poetic gifts save the accomplishment of verse. Naturalised foreigners, like the Hungarian St. Martin of Dumi, Archbishop of Braga, lent lustre to Spain at home. Spaniards, like Claude, Bishop of Turin and like Prudentius Galindus, Bishop of Troyes, carried the national fame abroad: the first in writings which prove the permanence of Seneca's tradition, the second in polemics against the pantheists. More rarely dowered was Theodolphus, the Spanish Bishop of Orleans, distinguished at Charlemagne's court as a man of letters and a poet; nor is it likely that Theodolphus' name can ever be forgotten, for his exultant hymn, Gloria, laus, et honor, is sung the world over on Palm Sunday. And scarcely less notable are the composers of the noble Latin-Gothic hymnal, the makers of the Breviarum Gothicum of Lorenzana and of Arévalo's Hymnodia Hispanica.

Enough has been said to show that, amid the tumult of Gothic supremacy in Spain, literature was pursued—though not by Goths—with results which, if not splendid, are at least unmatched in other Western lands. Doubtless in Spain, as elsewhere, much curious learning and insolent ignorance throve jowl by jowl. Like enough, some Spanish St. Ouen wrote down Homer, Menander, and Virgil as three plain blackguards; like enough, the Spanish biographer of some local St. Bavo confounded Tityrus with Virgil, and declared that Pisistratus' Athenian contemporaries spoke habitually in Latin. The conceit of ignorance is a thing eternal. Withal, from the age of Prudentius onward, literature was sustained in one or other shape. For a century after Tarik's landing there is a pause, unbroken save for the Chronicle of the anonymous Córdoban, too rashly identified as Isidore Pacensis. The intellectual revival appears, not among the Arabs, but among the Jews of Córdoba and Toledo; this last the immemorial home of magic where the devil was reputed to catch his own shadow. It was a devout belief that clerks went to Paris to study "the liberal arts," whereas in Toledo they mastered demonology and forgot their morals. Córdoba's fame, as the world's fine flower, crossed the German Rhine, and even reached the cloister of Roswitha, a nun who dabbled in Latin comedies. The achievements of Spanish Jews and Spanish Arabs call for separate treatises. Here it must suffice to say that the roll contains names mighty as that of the Jewish poet and philosopher Ibn Gebirol or Avicebron (d. ? 1070), whom Duns Scotus acknowledges as his master; and that of Judah ben Samuel the Levite (b. 1086), whom Heine celebrates in the Romanzero:

"Rein und wahrhaft, sonder Makel

War sein Lied, wie seine Seele."

In one sense, if we choose to fasten on his favourite trick of closing a Hebrew stanza with a romance line, Judah ben Samuel the Levite may be accounted the earliest of known experimentalists in Spanish verse; and an Arab poet of Spanish descent, Ibn Hazm, anticipated the Catalan, Auzías March, by founding a school of poetry, at once mystic and amorous.

But the Spanish Jews and Spanish Arabs gained their chief distinction in philosophy. Of these are Ibn Bājjah or Avempace (d. 1138), the opponent of al-Gazāli and his mystico-sceptical method; and Abū Bakr ibn al-Tufail (1116-85), the author of a neo-platonic, pantheistic romance entitled Risālat Haiy ibn Yakzān, of which the main thesis is that religious and philosophic truth are but two forms of the same thing. Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd (1126-98), best known as Averroes, taught the doctrine of the universal nature and unity of the human intellect, accounting for individual inequalities by a fantastic theory of stages of illumination. Arab though he was, Averroes was more reverenced by Jews than by men of his own race; and his permanent vogue is proved by the fact that Columbus cites him three centuries afterwards, while his teachings prevailed in the University of Padua as late as Luther's time. A more august name is that of "the Spanish Aristotle," Moses ben Maimon or Maimonides (1135-1204), the greatest of European Jews, the intellectual father, so to say, of Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas of Aquin. Born at Córdoba, Maimonides drifted to Cairo, where he became chief rabbi of the synagogue, and served as Saladin's physician, having refused a like post in the household of Richard the Lion-hearted. It is doubtful if Maimonides was a Jew at heart; it is unquestioned that at one time he conformed outwardly to Muhammadanism. A stinging epigram summarises his achievement by saying that he philosophised the Talmud and talmudised philosophy. It is, of course, absurd to suppose that his critical faculty could accept the childish legends of the Haggadah, wherein rabbis manifold report that the lion fears the cock's crow, that the salamander quenches fire, and other incredible puerilities. In his Yad ha-Hazakah (The Strong Hand) Maimonides seeks to purge the Talmud of its pilpulim or casuistic commentaries, and to make the book a sufficient guide for practical life rather than to leave it a dust-heap for intellectual scavengers. Hence he tends to a rationalistic interpretation of Scriptural records. Direct communion with the Deity, miracles, prophetic gifts, are not so much denied as explained away by means of a symbolic exegesis, infinitely subtle and imaginative. Spanish and African rabbis received the new teaching with docility, and in his own lifetime Maimonides' success was absolute. A certain section of his followers carried the cautious rationalism of the master to extremities, and thus produced the inevitable reaction of the Kabbala with its apparatus of elaborate extravagances. This reaction was headed by another Spaniard, the Catalan mystic, Bonastruc de Portas or Moses ben Nahman (1195-1270); and the relation of the two leaders is exemplified by the rabbinical legend which tells that the soul of each sprang from Adam's head: Maimonides, from the left curl, which typifies severity of judgment; Moses ben Nahman from the right, which symbolises tenderness and mercy.

On literature the pretended "Arab influence," if it exist at all, is nowise comparable to that of the Spanish Jews, who can boast that Judah ben Samuel the Levite lives as one of Dante's masters. Judah ranks among the great immortals of the world, and no Arab is fit to loosen the thong of his sandal. But it might very well befall a second-rate man, favoured by fortune and occasion, to head a literary revolution. It was not the case in Spain. The innumerable Spanish-Arab poets, vulgarised by the industry of Schack and interpreted by the genius of Valera, are not merely incomprehensible to us here and now; they were enigmas to most contemporary Arabs, who were necessarily ignorant of what was, to all purposes, a dead language—the elaborate technical vocabulary of Arabic verse. If their own countrymen failed to understand these poets, it would be surprising had their stilted artifice filtered into Castilian. It is unscientific, and almost unreasonable, to assume that what baffles the greatest Arabists of to-day was plain to a wandering mummer a thousand, or even six hundred, years ago. There is, however, a widespread belief that the metrical form of the Castilian romance (a simple lyrico-narrative poem in octosyllabic assonants) derives from Arabic models. This theory is as untenable as that which attributed Provençal rhythms to Arab singers. No less erroneous is the idea that the entire assonantic system is an Arab invention. Not only are assonants common to all Romance languages; they exist in Latin hymns composed centuries before Muhammad's birth, and therefore long before any Arab reached Europe. It is significant that no Arabist believes the legend of the "Arab influence"; for Arabists are not more given than other specialists to belittling the importance of their subject.

In sober truth, this Arab myth is but a bad dream of yesterday, a nightmare following upon an undigested perusal of the Thousand and One Nights. Thanks to Galland, Cardonne, and Herbelot, the notion became general that the Arabs were the great creative force of fiction. To father Spanish romances and Provençal trobas upon them is a mere freak of fancy. The tacit basis of this theory is that the Spaniards took a rare interest in the intellectual side of Arab life; but the assumption is not justified by evidence. Save in a casual passage, as that in the Crónica General on the capture of Valencia, the Castilian historians steadily ignore their Arab rivals. On the other hand, there is a class of romances fronterizos (border ballads), such as that on the loss of Alhama, which is based on Arabic legends; and at least one such ballad, that of Abenamar, may be the work of a Spanish-speaking Moor. But these are isolated cases, are exceptional solely as regards the source of the subject, and nowise differ in form from the two thousand other ballads of the Romanceros. To find a case of real imitation we must pass to the fifteenth century, when that learned lyrist, the Marqués de Santillana, deliberately experiments in the measures of an Arab zajal, a performance matched by a surviving fragment due to an anonymous poet in the Cancionero de Linares. These are metrical audacities, resembling the revival of French ballades and rondeaux by artificers like Mr. Dobson, Mr. Gosse, and Mr. Henley in our own day. On the strength of two unique modern examples in the history of Castilian verse, it would be unjustifiable to believe, in the teeth of all other evidence, that simple strollers intuitively assimilated rhythms whose intricacy bewilders the best experts. This is not to say that Arabic popular poetry had no influence on such popular Spanish verse as the coplas, of which some are apparently but translations of Arabic songs. That is an entirely different thesis; for we are concerned here with literature to which the halting coplas can scarcely be said to belong.

The "Arab influence" is to be sought elsewhere—in the diffusion of the Eastern apologue, morality, or maxim, deriving from the Sanskrit. M. Bédier argues with extraordinary force, ingenuity, and learning, against the universal Eastern descent of the French fabliaux. However that be, the immediate Arabic origin of such a collection as the Disciplina Clericalis of Petrus Alfonsus (printed, in part, as the Fables of Alfonce, by Caxton, 1483, in The Book of the subtyl Historyes and Fables of Esope), is as undoubted as the source of the apologue grafted on Castilian by Don Juan Manuel, or as the derivation of the maxims of Rabbi Sem Tom of Carrión. To this extent, in common with the rest of Europe, Spain owes the Arabs a debt which her picaresque novels and comedies have more than paid; but here again the Arab acts as a mere middleman, taking the story of Kalilah and Dimna from the Sanskrit through the Pehlevī version, and then passing it by way of Spain to the rest of the Continent. Nor should it be overlooked that Spaniards, disguised as Arabs, shared in the work of interpretation.

It is less easy to determine the extent to which colloquial Arabic was used in Spain. Patriots would persuade you that the Arabs brought nothing to the stock of general culture, and the more thoroughgoing insist that the Spaniards lent more than they borrowed. But the point may be pressed too far. It must be admitted that Arabic had a vogue, though perhaps not a vogue as wide as might be gathered from the testimony of Paulus Alvarus Cordubiensis, whose Indiculus Luminosus, a work of the ninth century, taunts the writer's countrymen with neglecting their ancient tongue for Hebrew and Arabic technicalities. The ethnic influence of the Arabs is still obvious in Granada and other southern towns; and intermarriages, tending to strengthen the sway of the victor's speech, were common from the outset, when Roderic's widow, Egilona, wedded Abd al-Aziz, son of Musa, her dead husband's conqueror. An Alfonso of León espoused the daughter of Abd Allah, Emir of Toledo; and an Alfonso of Castile took to wife the daughter of an Emir of Seville. "The wedding, which displeased God," of Alfonso the Fifth's sister with an Arab (some say with al-Mansūr), is sung in a famous romance inspired by the Crónica General.

In official charters, as early as 804, Arabic words find place. A local disuse of Latin is proved by the fact that in this ninth century the Bishop of Seville found it needful to render the Bible into Arabic for the use of Muzárabes; and still stronger evidence of the low estate of Latin is afforded by an Arabic version of canonical decrees. It follows that some among the very clergy read Arabic more easily than they read Latin. Jewish poets, like Avicebron and Judah ben Samuel the Levite, sometimes composed in Arabic rather than in their native Hebrew; and it is almost certain that the lays of the Arab rāwis radically modified the structure of Hebrew verse. Apart from the evidence of Paulus Alvarus Cordubiensis, St. Eulogius deposes that certain Christians—he mentions Isaac the Martyr by name—spoke Arabic to perfection. Nor can it be pleaded that this zeal was invariably due to official pressure: on the contrary, a caliph went the length of forbidding Spanish Jews and Christians to learn Arabic. Neither did the fashion die soon: long after the Arab predominance was shaken, Arabic was the modish tongue. Álvar Fáñez, the Cid's right hand, is detected signing his name in Arabic characters. The Christian dīnār, Arabic in form and superscription, was invented to combat the Almoravide dīnār, which rivalled the popularity of the Constantinople besant; and as late as the thirteenth century Spanish coins were struck with Arabic symbols on the reverse side.

Yet, even so, the rude Latin of the unconquered north remained well-nigh intact. Save in isolated centres, it was spoken by countless Christians and by the Spaniards who had escaped to the African province of Tingitana. Vast deduction must be made from the jeremiads of Paulus Alvarus Cordubiensis. As he bewails the time wasted on Hebrew and Arabic by Spaniards, so does Avicebron lament the use of Arabic and Romance by Jews. "One party speaks Idumean (Romance), the other the tongue of Kedar (Arabic)." If the Arab flood ran high, the ebb was no less strong. Arabs tended more and more to ape the dress, the arms, the customs of the Spaniards; and the Castilian-speaking Arab—the moro latinado—multiplied prodigiously. No small proportion of Arab writers—Ibn Hazm, for example—was made up of sons or grandsons of Spaniards, not unacquainted with their fathers' speech. When Archbishop Raimundo founded his College of Translators at Toledo, where Dominicus Gundisalvi collaborated with the convert Abraham ben David (Johannes Hispalensis), it might have seemed that the preservation of Arabic and Hebrew was secure. There and then, there could not have occurred such a blunder as that immortal one of the Capuchin, Henricus Seynensis, who lives eternal by mistaking the Talmud—"Rabbi Talmud"—for a man. But no Arab work endures. And as with Arab philosophy in Spain, so with the Arabic language: its soul was required of it. Hebrew, indeed, was not forgotten; and for Arabic, a revival might be expected during the Crusades. Yet in all Europe, outside Spain, but three isolated Arabists of that time are known—William of Tyre, Philip of Tripoli, and Adelard of Bath; and in Spain itself, when Boabdil surrendered in 1492, the tide had run so low that not a thousand Arabs in Granada could speak their native tongue. Nearly two centuries before (in 1311-12) a council under Pope Clement V. advised the establishment of Arabic chairs in the universities of Salamanca, Bologna, Paris, and Oxford. Save at Bologna, the counsel was ignored; and in Spain, where it had once swaggered with airs official, Arabic almost perished out of use.

Save a group of technical words, the sole literary legacy bequeathed to Spain by the Arabs was their alphabet. This they used in writing Castilian, calling their transcription aljamía (ajami = foreign), which was the original name of the broken Latin spoken by the Muzárabes. First introduced in legal documents, the practice was prudently continued during the reconquest, and, besides its secrecy, was further recommended by the fact that a special sanctity attaches to Arabic characters. But the peculiarity of aljamía is that it begot a literature of its own, though, naturally enough, a literature modelled on the Spanish. Its best production is the Poema de Yusuf; and it may be noted that this, like its much later fellow, La Alabanza de Mahoma (The Praise of Muhammad), is in the metre of the old Spanish "clerkly poems" (poesías de clerecía). So also the Aragonese Morisco, Muhammad Rabadán, writes his cyclic poem in Spanish octosyllabics; and in his successors there are hendecasyllabics manifestly imitated from a characteristic Galician measure (de gaita gallega). The subjects of the textos aljamiados are frankly conveyed from Western sources: the Compilation of Alexander, an orientalised version of the French; the History of the Loves of Paris and Viana, a translation from the Provençal; and the Maid of Arcayona, based on the Spanish poem Apolonio. In the Cancionero de Baena appears Mahomat-el-Xartosse, without his turban, as a full-fledged Spanish poet; and the old tradition of servility is continued by an anonymous refugee in Tunis, who shows himself an authority on the plays and the lyric verse of Lope de Vega.

It is therefore erroneous to suppose that the northern Spaniards on their southward march fell in with numerous kinsmen, of wider culture and of a higher civilisation, whose everyday speech was unintelligible to them, and who prayed to Christ in the tongue of Muhammad. Such cases may have occurred, but as the rarest exceptions. Not less unfounded is the theory that Castilian is a fusion of southern academic Arabic with barbarous northern Latin. In southern Spain Latin persisted, as Greek, Syriac, and Coptic persisted in other provinces of the Caliphate; and in the school founded at Córdoba by the Abbot Spera-in-Deo, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Quintilian, and Demosthenes were read as assiduously as Sallust, Horace, and Terence were studied in the northern provinces. Granting that Latin was for a while so much neglected that it was necessary to translate the Bible into Arabic, it is also true that Arabic grew so forgotten that Peter the Venerable was forced to translate the Ku'rān for the benefit of clerks. Lastly, it must be borne in mind that the variety of Romance which finally prevailed in Spain was not the speech of the northern highlanders, but that of the Muzárabes of the south and the centre. Long before "the sword of Pelagius had been transformed into the sceptre of the Catholic kings," the linguistic triumph of the south was achieved. The hazard of war might have yielded another issue; and to adopt another celebrated phrase of Gibbon's, but for the Cid and his successors, the Ku'rān might now be taught in the schools of Salamanca, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad. As it chanced, Arabic was rebuffed, and the Latin speech (or Romance) survived in its principal varieties of Castilian, Galician, Catalan, and bable (Asturian).

Gallic Latin had already bifurcated into the langue d'oui and the langue d'oc, though these names were not applied to the varieties till near the close of the twelfth century. Two hundred years before Roderic's overthrow a Spanish horde raided the south-west of France, and, in the corner south of the Adour, reimposed a tongue which Latin had almost entirely supplanted, and which lingered solely in the Basque Provinces and in Navarre. In the eighth century this Basque invasion was avenged. The Spaniards, concentrating in the north, vacated the eastern provinces, which were thereupon occupied by the Roussillonais, who, spreading as far south as Valencia, and as far east as the Balearic Islands, gave eastern Spain a new language. Deriving from the langue d'oc, Catalan divides into plá Catalá and Lemosí—the common speech and the literary tongue. Vidal de Besalu calls his own Provençal language limosina or lemozi, and the name, taken from his popular treatise Dreita Maneira de Trobar, was at first limited to literary Provençal; but endless confusion arises from the fact that when Catalans took to composing, their poems were likewise said to be written in lengua lemosina.

The Galician, akin to Portuguese, though free from the nasal element grafted on the latter by Burgundians, is held by some for the oldest—though clearly not the most virile—form of Peninsular Romance. It was at least the first to ripen, and, under Provençal guidance, Galician verse acquired the flexibility needed for metrical effects long before Castilian; so that Castilian court-poets, ambitious of finer rhythmical results, were driven to use Galician, which is strongly represented in the Cancionero de Baena, and boasts an earlier masterpiece in Alfonso the Learned's Cantigas de Santa María, recently edited, as it deserved, after six centuries of waiting, by that admirable scholar the Marqués de Valmar. Galician, now little more than a simple dialect, is artificially kept alive by the efforts of patriotic minor poets; but its literary influence is extinct, and the distinguished figures of the province, as Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, naturally seek a larger audience by writing in Castilian. So, too, bable is but another dialect of little account, though a poet of considerable charm, Teodoro Cuesta (1829-95), has written in it verses which his own loyal people will not willingly let die. The classification of other characteristic sub-genera—Andalucían, Aragonese, Leonese—belongs to philology, and would be, in any event, out of place in the history of a literature to which, unlike Catalan and unlike Galician, they have added nothing of importance. What befell in Italy and France befell in Spain. Partly through political causes, partly by force of superior culture, the language of a single centre ousted its rivals. As France takes its speech from Paris and the Île de France, as Florence dominates Italy, so Castile dictates her language to all the Spains. The dominant type, then, of Spanish is the Castilian, which, as the most potent form, has outlived its brethren, and, with trifling variations, now extends, not only over Spain, but as far west as Lima and Valparaiso, and as far east as the Philippine Islands: in effect, "from China to Peru." And the Castilian of to-day differs little from the Castilian of the earliest monuments.

The first allusion to any distinct variety of Romance is found in the life of a certain St. Mummolin who was Bishop of Noyen, succeeding St. Eloi in 659. A reference to the Spanish type of Romance is found as far back as 734; but the authenticity of the document is very doubtful. The breaking-up of Latin in Spain is certainly observable in Bishop Odoor's will under the date of 747. The celebrated Strasburg Oaths, the oldest of Romance instruments, belong to the year 842; and, in an edict of 844, Charles the Bald mentions, as a thing apart, "the customary language"—usitato vocabulo—of the Spaniards. There is, however, no existing Spanish manuscript so ancient, nor is there any monument as old, as the Italian Carta di Capua (960). The British Museum contains a curious codex from the Convent of Santo Domingo de Silos, on the margin of which a contemporary has written the vernacular equivalent of some four hundred Latin words; but this is no earlier than the eleventh century. The Charter called the Fuero de Avilés of 1155 (which is in bable or Asturian, not Castilian), has long passed for the oldest example of Spanish, on the joint and several authority of González Llanos, Ticknor, and Gayangos; but Fernández-Guerra y Orbe has proved it to be a forgery of much later date.

These intricate questions of authority and ascription may well be left unsettled, for legal documents are but the dry bones of letters. Castilian literature dates roughly from the twelfth century. Though no Castilian document of extent can be referred to that period, the Misterio de los Reyes Magos (The Mystery of the Magian Kings) and the group of cantares called the Poema del Cid can scarcely belong to any later time. These, probably, are the jetsam of a cargo of literature which has foundered. It is unlikely that the two most ancient compositions in Castilian verse should be precisely the two preserved to us, and it is manifest that the epic as set forth in the Poema del Cid could not have been a first effort. Doubtless there were other older, shorter songs or cantares on the Cid's prowess; there unquestionably were songs upon Bernaldo de Carpio and upon the Infantes de Lara which are rudely preserved in assonantic prose passages of the Crónica General. An ingenious, deceptive theory lays it down that the epic is but an amalgam of cantilenas, or short lyrics in the vulgar tongue. At most this is a pious opinion.

To judge by the analogy of other literatures, it is safe to say that as verse always precedes prose (just as man feels before he reasons), so the epic everywhere precedes the lyric form, with the possible exception of hymns. The Poema del Cid, for instance, shows no trace of lyrical descent; and it is far likelier that the many surviving romances or ballads on the Cid are detached fragments of an epic, than that the epic should be a pastiche of ballads put together nobody knows why, when, where, how, or by whom. But in any case the cantilena theory is idle; for, since no cantilenas exist, no evidence is—or can be—forthcoming to eke out an attractive but unconvincing thesis. In default of testimony and of intrinsic probability, the theory depends solely on bold assertion, and it suffices to say that the cantilena hypothesis is now abandoned by all save a knot of fanatical partisans.

The exploits of the battle-field would, in all likelihood, be the first subjects of song; and the earliest singers of these deeds—gesta—would appear in the chieftain's household. They sang to cheer the freebooters on the line of march, and a successful foray was commemorated in some war-song like Dinas Vawr's:

"Ednyfed, King of Dyfed,

His head was borne before us;

His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,

And his overthrow our chorus."

Soon the separation between combatants and singers became absolute: the division has been effected in the interval which divides the Iliad from the Odyssey. Achilles himself sings the heroes' glories; in the Odyssey the ἀοιδός or professional singer appears, to be succeeded by the rhapsode. Slowly there evolve in Spain, as elsewhere, two classes of artists known as trovadores and juglares. The trovadores are generally authors; the juglares are mere executants—singers, declaimers, mimes, or simple mountebanks. Of these lowlier performers one type has been immortalised in M. Anatole France's Le Jongleur de Notre Dame, a beautiful re-setting of the old story of El Tumbeor. But between trovadores and juglares it is not possible to draw a hard-and-fast line: their functions intermingled. Some few trovadores anticipated Wagner by eight or nine centuries, composing their own music-drama on a lesser scale. In cases of special endowment, the composer of words and music delivered them to the audience.

Subdivisions abounded. There were the juglares or singing-actors, the remendadores or mimes, the cazurros or mutes with duties undefined, resembling those of the intelligent "super." Gifted juglares at whiles produced original work; a trovador out of luck sank to delivering the lines of his happier rivals; and a stray remendador struggled into success as a juglar. There were juglares de boca (reciters) and juglares de péñola (musicians). Even an official label may deceive; thus a "Gómez trovador" is denoted in the year 1197, but the likelihood is that he was a mere juglar. The normal rule was that the juglar recited the trovador's verses; but, as already said, an occasional trovador (Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino, at Seville, in the fifteenth century, is a case in point) would declaim his own ballad. In the juglar's hands the original was cut or padded to suit the hearers' taste. He subordinated the verses to the music, and gave them maimed, or arabesqued with estribillos (refrains), to fit a popular air. The monotonous repetition of epithet and clause, common to all early verse, is used to lessen the strain on the juglar's memory. The commonest arrangement was that the juglar de boca sang the trovador's words, the juglar de péñola accompanying on some simple instrument, while the remendador gave the story in pantomime.

All the world over the history of early literatures is identical. With the Greeks the minstrel attains at last an important post in the chieftain's train. Seated on a high chair inlaid with silver, he entertains the guests, or guards the wife of Agamemnon, his patron and his friend. Just so does Phemios sing amid the suitors of Penelope. It was not always thus. Bentley has told us in his pointed way that "poor Homer in those circumstances and early times had never such aspiring thoughts" as mankind and everlasting fame; and that "he wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals, and other days of merriment." This rise and fall occurred in Spain as elsewhere. For her early trovadores or juglares, as for Demodokos in the Odyssey, and as for Fergus MacIvor's sennachie, a cup of wine sufficed. "Dat nos del vino si non tenedes dinneros," says the juglar who sang the Cid's exploits: "Give us wine, if you have no money." Gonzalo de Berceo, the first Castilian writer whose name reaches us, is likewise the first Castilian to use the word trovador in his Loores de Nuestra Señora (The Praises of Our Lady):

"Aun merced te pido por el tu trobador."

(Thy favour I implore for this thy troubadour.)

But, though a priest and a trovador proud of his double office, Berceo claims his wages without a touch of false shame. In his Vida del glorioso Confesor Sancto Domingo de Silos he proves the overlapping of his functions by styling himself the saint's juglar; and in the opening of the same poem he vouches for it that his song "will be well worth, as I think, a glass of good wine":

"Bien valdrá, commo creo, un vaso de bon vino."

As popularity grew, modesty disappeared. The trovador, like the rest of the world, failed under the trials of prosperity. He became the curled darling of kings and nobles, and haggled over prices and salaries in the true spirit of "our eminent tenor." In a rich land like France he was given horses, castles, estates; in the poorer Spain he was fain to accept, with intermittent grumblings, embroidered robes, couches, ornaments—"muchos paños é sillas é guarnimientos nobres." He was spoon-fed, dandled, pampered, and sedulously ruined by the disastrous good-will of his ignorant betters. These could not leave Ephraim alone: they too must wed his idols. Alfonso the Learned enlisted in the corps of trovadores, as Alfonso II. of Aragón had done before him; and King Diniz of Portugal followed the example. To pose as a trovador became in certain great houses a family tradition. The famous Constable, Álvaro de Luna, composes because his uncle, Don Pedro, the Archbishop of Toledo, has preceded him in the school. Grouped round the commanding figure of the Marqués de Santillana stand the rivals of his own house-top: his grandfather, Pedro González de Mendoza; his father, the Admiral Diego Furtado de Mendoza, a picaroon poet, spiteful, brutal, and witty; his uncle, Pedro Vélez de Guevara, who turns you a song of roguery or devotion with equal indifference and mastery. Santillana's is "a numerous house, with many kinsmen gay"; still, in all save success, his case typifies a dominant fashion.

In the society of clerkly magnates the trovador's accomplishments developed; and the equipped artist was expected to be master of several instruments, to be pat with litanies of versified tales, and to have Virgil at his finger-tips. Schools were founded where aspirants were taught to trobar and fazer on classic principles, and the breed multiplied till trovador and juglar possessed the land. The world entire—tall, short, old, young, nobles, serfs—did nought but make or hear verses, as that trovador errant, Vidal de Besalu, records. It may be that Poggio's anecdote of a later time is literally true: that a poor man, absorbed in Hector's story, paid the spouter to adjourn the catastrophe from day to day till, his money being spent, he was forced to hear the end with tears.

Troubadouring became at last a pestilence no less mischievous than its successor knight-errantry, and its net was thrown more widely. Alfonso of Aragón led the way with a celebrated Provençal ballad, wherein he avers that "not snow, nor ice, nor summer, but God and love are the motives of my song":

"Mas al meu chan neus ni glatz

No m'ajuda, n'estaz,

Ni res, mas Dieus et amors."

Not every man could hope to be a knight; but all ranks and both sexes could—and did—sing of God and love. To emperors and princes must be added the lowlier figures of Berceo, in Spain, or—to go afield for the extremest case—the Joculator Domini, the inspired madman, Jacopone da Todi, in Italy. With the juglar strolled the primitive actress, the juglaresa, mentioned in the Libre del Apolonio, and branded as "infamous" in Alfonso's code of Las Siete Partidas. At the court of Juan II., in the fifteenth century, the eccentric Garci Ferrandes of Jerena, a court poet, married a juglaresa, and lived to lament the consequences in a cántica of the Cancionero de Baena (No. 555). In northern Europe there flourished a tribe of jovial clerics called Goliards (after a mythical Pope Golias), who counted Catullus, Horace, and Ovid for their masters, and blent their anacreontics with blasphemy—as in the Confessio Goliæ, wrongly ascribed to our Walter Map. The repute of this gentry is chronicled in the Canterbury Tales:

"He was a jangler and a goliardeis,

And that was of most sin and harlotries."

And the type, if not the name, existed in the Peninsula. So much might be inferred from the introduction and passage of a law forbidding the ordination of juglares; and, in the Cancioneiro Portuguez da Vaticana (No. 931), Estevam da Guarda banters a juglar who, taking orders in expectance of a prebend which he never received, was prevented by his holy estate from returning to his craft. But close at hand, in the person of Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita—the greatest name in early Castilian literature—is your Spanish Goliard incarnate.

The prosperity of trovador and juglar could not endure. First of foreign trovadores to reach Spain, the Gascon Marcabru treats Alfonso VII. (1126-57) almost as an equal. Raimbaud de Vaquerias, in what must be among the earliest copies of Spanish verse (not without a Galician savour), holds his head no less high; and the apotheosis of the juglar is witnessed by Vidal de Besalu at the court of Alfonso VIII. (1158-1214).

"Unas novas vos vuelh comtar

Que auzi dir a un joglar

En la cort del pus savi rei

Que anc fos de neguna lei."

"Fain would I give ye the verses which I heard recited by a juglar at the court of the most learned king that ever any rule beheld." This was the "happier Age of Gold." A century and a half later, Alfonso the Learned, himself, as we have seen, a trovador, classes the juglar and his assistants—los que son juglares, e los remendadores—with the town pimp; and fathers not themselves juglares are empowered to disinherit any son who takes to the calling against his father's will. The Villasandino, already mentioned, a pert Galician trovador at Juan II.'s court, was glad to speak his own pieces at Seville, and candidly avowed that, like his early predecessors, he "worked for bread and wine"—"labro por pan e vino."

The foreign singer had received the half-pence; the native received the kicks. And in the last decline the executants were blind men who sang before church-doors and in public squares, lacing old ballads with what they were pleased to call "emendations," or, in other words, intruding original banalities of their own. This decline of material prosperity had a most disastrous effect upon literature. A popular cantar or song was written by a poor man of genius. Accordingly he sold his copyright: that is to say, he taught his cantar to reciters, who paid in cash, or in drink, when they had it by heart, and thus the song travelled the country overlong with no author's name attached to it. More: repeated by many lips during a long period of years, the form of a very popular cantar manifestly ran the risk of change so radical that within a few generations the original might be transformed in such wise as to be practically lost. This fate has, in effect, overtaken the great body of early Spanish song.

It is beyond question that there once existed cantares (though we cannot fix their date) in honour of Bernaldo de Carpio, of Fernán González, and of the Infantes de Lara; the point as regards the Infantes de Lara is proved to demonstration in the masterly study of D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal. The assonants of the original songs are found preserved in the chronicles, and no one with the most rudimentary idea of the conditions of Spanish prose-composition (whence assonants are banned with extreme severity) can suppose that any Spaniard could write a page of assonants in a fit of absent-mindedness. Two considerable cantares de gesta of the Cid survive as fragments, and they owe their lives to a happy accident—the accident of being written down. They must have had fellows, but probably not an immense number of them, as in France. If the formal cantar de gesta died young, its spirit lived triumphantly in the set chronicle and in the brief romance. In the chronicle the author aims at closer exactitude and finer detail, in the romance at swifter movement and at greater picturesqueness of artistic incident. The term romanz or romance, first of all limited to any work written in the vernacular, is used in that sense by the earliest of all known troubadours, Count William of Poitiers.

In the thirteenth century, romanz or romance acquires a fresh meaning in Spain, begins to be used as an equivalent for cantar, and ends by supplanting the word completely. Hence, by slow degrees, romance comes to have its present value, and is applied to a lyrico-narrative poem in eight-syllabled assonants. The Spanish Romancero is, beyond all cavil, the richest mine of ballad poetry in the world, and it was once common to declare that it embodied the oldest known examples of Castilian verse. As the assertion is still made from time to time, it becomes necessary to say that it is unfounded. It is true that the rude cantar was never forgotten in Spain, and that its persistence partly explains the survival of assonance in Castilian long after its abandonment by the rest of Europe. In his historic letter to Dom Pedro, Constable of Portugal, the Marqués de Santillana speaks with a student's contempt of singers who, "against all order, rule, and rhythm, invent these romances and cantares wherein common lewd fellows do take delight." But no specimens of the primitive age remain, and no existing romance is older than Santillana's own fifteenth century.

The numerous Cancioneros from Baena's time to the appearance of the Romancero General (the First Part printed in 1602, with additions in 1604-14; the Second Part issued in 1605) present a vast collection of admirable lyrics, mostly the work of accomplished courtly versifiers. They contain very few examples of anything that can be justly called old popular songs. Alonso de Fuentes published in 1550 his Libro de los Cuarenta Cantos de Diversas y Peregrinas Historias, and in the following year was issued Lorenzo de Sepúlveda's selection. Both profess to reproduce the "rusticity" as well as the "tone and metre" of the ancient romances; but, in fact, these songs, like those given by Escobar in the Romancero del Cid (1612), are either written by such students as Cesareo, who read up his subject in the chronicles, and imitated the old manner as best he could, or they are due to others who treated the oral traditions and pliegos sueltos (broadsides) of Spain with the same inspired freedom that Burns showed to the local ditties and chapbooks of Scotland. The two oldest romances bearing any author's name are given in Lope de Stúñiga's Cancionero, and are the work of Carvajal, a fifteenth-century poet. Others may be of earlier date; but it is impossible to identify them, inasmuch as they have been retouched and polished by singers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. If they exist at all—a matter of grave uncertainty—they must be sought in the two Antwerp editions of Martin Nucio's Cancionero de Romances (one undated, the other of 1550), and in Esteban de Nájera's Silva de Romances, printed at Zaragoza in 1550.

There remains to say a last word on the disputed relation between the early Castilian and French literatures. Like the auctioneer in Middlemarch, patriots "talk wild": as Amador de los Ríos in his monumental fragment, and the Comte de Puymaigre in his essays. No fact is better established than the universal vogue of French literature between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, a vogue which lasted till the real supremacy of Dante and Boccaccio and Petrarch was reluctantly acknowledged. It is probable that Frederic Barbarossa wrote in Provençal; his nephew, Frederic II., sedulously aped the Provençal manner in his Italian verses called the Lodi della donna amata. Marco Polo, Brunetto Latini, and Mandeville wrote in French for the same reason that almost persuaded Gibbon to write his History in French. The substitution of the Gallic for the Gothic character in the eleventh century advanced one stage further a process begun by the French adventurers who shared in the reconquest.

With these last came the French jongleurs to teach the Spaniards the gentle art of making the chanson de geste. The very phrase, cantar de gesta, bespeaks its French source. As the root of the Cid epic lies in Roland, so the Mystery of the Magian Kings is but an offshoot of the Cluny Liturgy. The earliest mention of the Cid, in the Latin Chronicle of Almería, joins the national hero, significantly enough, with those two unexampled paragons of France, Oliver and Roland. Another French touch appears in the Poem of Fernán González, where the writer speaks of Charlemagne's defeat at Roncesvalles, and laments that the battle was not an encounter with the Moors, in which Bernaldo del Carpio might have scattered them. But we are not left to conjecture and inference; the presence of French jongleurs is attested by irrefragable evidence.[1] Sancho I. of Portugal had at court a French jongleur who in name, if in nothing else, somewhat resembled Guy de Maupassant's creation, "Bon Amis." It is not proved that Sordello ever reached Spain; but, in the true manner of your bullying parasite, he denounces St. Ferdinand as one who "should eat for two, since he rules two kingdoms, and is unfit to govern one":—

"E lo Reis castelás tanh qu'en manje per dos,

Quar dos regismes ten, ni per l'un non es pros."

Sordello, indeed, in an earlier couplet denounces St. Louis of France as "a fool"; but Sordello is a mere bilk and blackmailer with the gift of song.

Among French minstrels traversing Spain are Père Vidal, who vaunts the largesse of Alfonso VIII., and Guirauld de Calanson, who lickspittles the name of Pedro II. of Aragón. Upon them followed Guilhem Azémar, a déclassé noble, who sank to earning his bread as a common jongleur, and later on there comes a crowd of singing-quacks and booth-spouters. It is usual to lay stress upon the influx of French among the pilgrims of the Milky Way on the road to the shrine of the national St. James at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia; and it is a fact that the first to give us a record of this pious journey is Aimeric Picaud in the twelfth century, who unkindly remarks of the Basques, that "when they eat, you would take them for hogs, and when they speak, for dogs." This vogue was still undiminished three hundred years later when our own William Wey (once Fellow of Eton, and afterwards, as it seems, an Augustinian monk at Edyngdon Monastery in Wiltshire) wrote his Itinerary (1456). But though the pilgrimage to Santiago is noted as a peculiarly "French devotion" by Lope de Vega in his Francesilla (1620), it is by no means clear that the French pilgrims outnumbered those of other nations. Even if they did, this would not explain the literary predominance of France. This is not to be accounted for by the scampering flight of a horde of illiterate fakirs anxious only to save their souls and reach their homes: it is rather the natural result of a steady immigration of clerks in the suites of French bishops and princes, of French monks attracted by the spoil of Spanish monasteries, of French lords and knights and gentlemen who shared in the Crusades, and whose jongleurs, mimes, and tumblers came with them.

Explain it as we choose, the influence of France on Spain is puissant and enduring. One sees it best when the Spaniard, natural or naturalised, turns crusty. Roderic of Toledo (himself an archbishop of the Cluny clique) protests against those Spanish juglares who celebrate the fictitious victories of Charlemagne in Spain; and Alfonso the Learned bears him out by deriding the songs and fables on these mythic triumphs, since the Emperor "at most conquered somewhat in Cantabria." A passage in the Crónica General goes to show that some, at least, of the early French jongleurs sang to their audiences in French—clearly, as it seems, to a select, patrician circle. And this raises, obviously, a curious question. It seems natural to admit that in Spain (let us say in Navarre and Upper Aragón) poems were written by French trouvères and troubadours in a mixed hybrid jargon; and the very greatest of Spanish scholars, D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, inclines to believe in their possible existence. There is, in L'Entrée en Espagne, a passage wherein the author declares that, besides the sham Chronicle of Turpin, his chief authorities are

"dous bons clerges Çan-gras et Gauteron,

Çan de Navaire et Gautier d'Arragon."

John of Navarre and Walter of Aragón may be, as Señor Menéndez y Pelayo suggests, two "worthy clerks" who once existed in the flesh, or they may be imaginings of the author's brain. More to the point is the fact that, unlike the typical chanson de geste, this Entrée en Espagne has two distinct types of rhythm (the Alexandrine and the twelve-syllable line), as in the Poema del Cid; and not less significant is the foreign savour of the language. All that can be safely said is that Señor Menéndez y Pelayo's theory is probable enough in itself, that it is presented with great ingenuity, that it is backed by the best authority that opinion can have, and that it is incapable of proof or disproof in the absence of texts.

But if Spain, unlike Italy, has no authentic poems in an intermediate tongue, proofs of French influence are not lacking in her earliest movements. Two of the most ancient Castilian lyrics—Razón feita d'Amor and the Disputa del Alma—are mere liftings from the French; the Book of Apolonius teems with Provençalisms, and the poem called the History of St. Mary of Egypt is so gallicised in idiom that Milá y Fontanals, a ripe scholar and a true-blue Spaniard, was half inclined to think it one of those intermediary productions which are sought in vain. At every point proofs of French guidance confront us. Anxious to buffet and outrage his father's old trovador, Pero da Ponte, Alfonso the Learned taunts him with illiteracy, seeing that he does not compose in the Provençal vein:—

"Vos non trovades como proençal."

And, for our purpose, we are justified in appealing to Portugal for testimony, remembering always that Portugal exaggerates the condition of things in Spain. King Diniz, Alfonso the Learned's nephew, plainly indicates his model when in the Vatican Cancioneiro (No. 123) he declares that he "would fain make a love-song in the Provençal manner":—

"Quer' eu, en maneyra de proençal,

Fazer agora um cantar d'amor."

And Alfonso's own Cantigas, honeycombed with Gallicisms, are frankly Provençal in their wonderful variety of metre. Nor should we suppose that the Provençaux fought the battle alone: the northern trouvères bore their part.

The French school, then, is strong in Spain, omnipotent in Portugal, and, were the Spanish Cancioneros as old as the Portuguese Song-book in the Vatican, we should probably find that the foreign influence was but a few degrees less marked in the one country than in the other. As it is, Alfonso the Learned ranks with any Portuguese of them all; and it is reasonable to think that he had fellows whose achievement and names have not reached us. For Spanish literature and ourselves the loss is grave; and yet we cannot conceive that there existed in early Castilian any examples comparable in elaborate lyrical beauty to the cantars d'amigo which the Galician-Portuguese singers borrowed from the French ballettes. In the first place, if they had existed, it is next to incredible that no example and no tradition of them should survive. Next, the idea is intrinsically improbable, since the Castilian language was not yet sufficiently ductile for the purpose. Moreover, from the outset there is a counter-current in Castile. The early Spanish legends are mostly concerned with Spanish subjects. Apart from obvious foreign touches in the early recensions of the story of Bernaldo de Carpio (who figures as Charlemagne's nephew), the tone of the ballads is hostile to the French, and, as is natural, the enmity grows more pronounced with time. That national hero, the Cid, is especially anti-French. He casts the King of France in gaol; he throws away the French King's chair with insult in St. Peter's. Still more significant is the fact that the character of French women becomes a jest. Thus, the balladist emphasises the fact that the faithless wife of Garci-Fernández is French; and, again, when Sancho García's mother, likewise French, appears in a romance, the singer gives her a blackamoor—an Arab—as a lover. This is primitive man's little way, the world over: he pays off old scores by deriding the virtue of his enemy's wife, mother, daughter, sister; and in primitive Spain the Frenchwoman is the lightning-conductor of international scandals, tolerable by the camp-fire, but tedious in print.

In considering early Spanish verse it behoves us to denote facts and to be chary in drawing inferences. Thus, while we admit that the Poema del Cid and the Chanson de Roland belong to the same genre, we can go no further. It is not to be assumed that similarity of incident necessarily implies direct imitation. The introduction of the fighting bishop in the Cid poem is a case in point. His presence in the field may be—almost certainly is—an historic event, common enough in days when a militant bishop loved to head a charge; and the chronicler may well have seen the exploits which he records. It by no means follows, and it is extravagant to suppose, that the Spanish juglar merely filches from the Chanson de Roland. That he had heard the Chanson is not only probable, but likely; it is not, to say the least, a necessary consequence that he annexed an episode as familiar in Spain as elsewhere. Nothing, if you probe deep enough, is new, and originality is a vain dream. But some margin must be left for personal experience and the hazard of circumstance; and if we take account of the chances of coincidence, the debt of Castilian to French literature will appear in its due perspective. Nor must it be forgotten that from a very early date there are traces of the reflex action of Castilian upon French literature. They are not, indeed, many; but they are authentic beyond carping. In the ancient Fragment de la Vie de Saint Fidès d'Agen, which dates from the eleventh century, the Spanish origin is frankly admitted:—

"Canson audi que bellantresca

Que fo de razon espanesca"—

"I heard a beauteous song that told of Spanish things." Or, once more, in Adenet le Roi's Cléomadès, and in its offshoot the Méliacin of Girard d'Amiens, we meet with the wooden horse (familiar to readers of Don Quixote) which bestrides the spheres and curvets among the planets. Borrowed from the East, the story is transmitted to the Greeks, is annexed by the Arabs, and is passed on through them to Spain, whence Adenet le Roi conveys it for presentation to the western world.

More directly and more characteristically Spanish in its origin is the royal epic entitled Anséis de Carthage. Here, after the manner of your epic poet, chronology is scattered to the winds, and we learn that Charlemagne left in Spain a king who dishonoured the daughter of one of his barons; hence the invasion by the Arabs, whom the baron lets loose upon his country as avengers. The basis of the story is purely Spanish, being a somewhat clumsy arrangement of the legend of Roderic, Cora, and Count Julian; the city of Carthage standing, it may be, for the Spanish Cartagena. Hence it is clear that the mutual literary debt of Spain and France is, at this early stage, unequally divided. Spain, like the rest of the world, borrows freely; but, with the course of time, the position is reversed. Molière, the two Corneilles, Rotrou, Sorel, Scarron, and Le Sage, to mention but a few eminent names at hazard, readjust the balance in favour of Spain; and the inexhaustible resources of the Spanish theatre, which supply the arrangements of scores of minor French dramatists, are but a small part of the literature whose details are our present concern.

Footnote:

[1] See Milá y Fontanals, Los Trovadores en España (Barcelona, 1889), and the same writer's Resenya histórica y crítica dels antichs poetas catalans in the third volume of his Obras completas (Barcelona, 1890).

CHAPTER II
THE ANONYMOUS AGE
1150-1220

In Spain, as in all countries where it is possible to observe the origin and the development of letters, the earliest literature bears the stamp of influences which are either epic or religious. These primitive pieces are characterised by a vein of popular, unconscious poetry, with scarce a touch of personal artistry; and the ascription which refers one or other of them to an individual writer is, for the most part, arbitrary. Insufficiency of data makes it impossible to identify the oldest literary performance in Spanish Romance. Jews like Judah ben Samuel the Levite, and trovadores like Rambaud de Vaqueiras, arabesque their verses with Spanish tags and refrains; but these are whimsies. Our choice lies rather between the Misterio de los Reyes Magos (Mystery of the Magian Kings) and the so-called Poema del Cid (Poem of the Cid). Experts differ concerning their respective dates; but the liturgical derivation of the Misterio inclines one to hold it for the elder of the two. If Lidforss were right in attributing it to the eleventh century, the play would rank among the first in any modern language. Amador de los Ríos dates it still further back. As these pretensions are excessive, the known facts may be briefly given. The Misterio follows upon a commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, written by a canon of Auxerre, Gilibert l'Universel, who died in 1134; and its existence was first denoted at the end of the last century by Felipe Fernández Vallejo, Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela between 1798 and 1800, who correctly classified it as a dramatic scene to be given on the Feast of the Epiphany, and considered it a version from some Latin original. Both conjectures have proved just. Throughout Europe the Christian theatre derives from the Church, and the early plays are but a lay vernacular rendering of models studied in the sanctuary. Simplified as the liturgy now is, the Mass itself, the services of Palm Sunday and Good Friday, are the unmistakable débris of an elaborate sacred drama.

The Spanish Misterio proceeds from one of the Latin offices used at Limoges, Rouen, Nevers, Compiègne, and Orleans, with the legend of the Magi for a motive; and these, in turn, are dramatic renderings of pious traditions, partly oral, and partly amplifications of the apocryphal Protevangelium Jacobi Minoris and the Historia de Nativitate Mariæ et de Infantiâ Salvatoris.[2] These Franco-Latin liturgical plays, here mentioned in the probable order of their composition during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, reached Spain through the Benedictines of Cluny; and as in each original redaction there is a distinct advance upon its immediate predecessor, so in the Spanish rendering these primitive exemplars are developed. In the Limoges version there is no action, the rudimentary dialogue consisting in the allotment of liturgical phrases among the personages; in the Rouen office, the number of actors is increased, and Herod, though he does not appear, is mentioned; a still later redaction brings the shepherds on the scene. The Spanish Misterio reaches us as a fragment of some hundred and fifty lines, ending at the moment when the rabbis consult their sacred books upon Herod's appeal to

"the prophecies

Which Jeremiah spake."

Its provenance is proved by the inclusion of three Virgilian lines (Æneid, viii. 112-114), lifted by the arranger of the Orleans rite. The Magi are mentioned by name, and one speech is given by Gaspar: important points which help to fix the date of writing. A passage in Bede speaks of Melchior, senex et canus; of Baltasar, fuscus, integre barbatus; of Gaspar, juvenis imberbis; but this appears to be interpolated. The names likewise appear in the famous sixth-century mosaic of the Church of Sant' Apollinare della Città at Ravenna; and here, again, the insertion is probably a pious afterthought. If Hartmann be justified in his contention, that the traditional names of the Magi were not in vogue till after the alleged discovery of their remains at Milan in 1158, the Spanish Misterio can be, at best, no older than the end of the twelfth century.

Enough of it remains to show that the Spanish workman improved upon his models. He elaborates the dramatic action, quickens the dialogue with newer life, and gives his scene an ampler, a more vivid atmosphere. Led by the heavenly star, the three Magi first appear separately, then together; they celebrate the birth of Christ, whom they seek to adore, at the end of their thirteen days' pilgrimage. Encountering Herod, they confide to him their mission; the King conjures his "abbots" (rabbis), counsellors, and soothsayers to search the mystic books, and to say whether the Magis' tale be true. The passages between Herod and his rabbis are marked by intensity and passion, far exceeding the Franco-Latin models in dramatic force; and there is a corresponding progress of mechanism, distribution, and rapidity.

There is even a breath of the critical spirit wholly absent from all other early mysteries, which accept the miraculous sign of the star with a simple, unquestioning faith. In our play, the first and third Magi wish to observe it another night, while the second King would fain watch it for three entire nights. Lastly, the scale of the Misterio is larger than that of any predecessor; the personages are not huddled upon the scene at once, but appear in appropriate, dramatic order, delivering more elaborate speeches, and expressing at greater length more individual emotions. This fragmentary piece, written in octosyllabics, forms the foundation-stone of the Spanish theatre; and from it are evolved, in due progression, "the light and odour of the flowery and starry Autos" which were to enrapture Shelley. Important and venerable as is the Misterio, its freer treatment of the liturgy, its effectual blending of realism with devotion, and its swiftness of action are so many arguments against its reputed antiquity. It is still old if we adopt the conclusion that it was written some twenty years before the Poema del Cid.

This misnamed epic, no unworthy fellow to the Chanson de Roland, is the first great monument of Spanish literature. Like the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, like so many early pieces, the Poema del Cid reaches us maimed and mutilated. The beginning is lost; a page in the middle, containing some fifty lines following upon verse 2338, has gone astray from our copy; and the end has been retouched by unskilful fingers. The unique manuscript in which the cantar exists belongs to the fourteenth century: so much is now settled after infinite disputes. The original composition is thought to date from about the middle third of the twelfth century (1135-75), some fifty years after the Cid's death at Valencia in 1099. Hence the Poem of the Cid stands almost midway between the Chanson de Roland and the Niebelungenlied. Nevertheless, in its surviving shape it is the result of innumerable retouches which amount to botching. Its authorship is more than doubtful, for the Per Abbat who obtrudes in the closing lines is, like the Turoldus of Roland, the mere transcriber of an unfaithful copy. Our gratitude to Per Abbat is dashed with regret for his slapdash methods. The assonants are roughly handled, whole phrases are unintelligently repeated, are transferred from one line to another, or are thrust out from the text, and in some cases two lines are crushed into one. The prevailing metre is the Alexandrine or fourteen-syllabled verse, probably adopted in conscious imitation of that Latin chronicle on the conquest of Almería which first reveals the national champion under his popular title—

"Ipse Rodericus, Mio Cid semper vocatus,

De quo cantatur, quod ab hostibus haud superatus."

However that may be, the normal measure is reproduced with curious infelicity. Some lines run to twenty syllables, some halt at ten, and it cannot be doubted that many of these irregularities are results of careless copying. Still, to Per Abbat we owe the preservation of the Cid cantar as we owe to Sánchez its issue in 1779, more than half a century before any French chanson de geste was printed.

The Spanish epic has a twofold theme—the exploits of the exiled Cid, and the marriage of his two (mythical) daughters to the Infantes de Carrión. Diffused through Europe by the genius of Corneille, who conveyed his conception from Guillén de Castro, the legendary Cid differs hugely from the Cid of history. Uncritical scepticism has denied his existence; but Cervantes, with his good sense, hit the white in the first part of Don Quixote (chapter xlix.). Unquestionably the Cid lived in the flesh: whether or not his alleged achievements occurred is another matter. Irony has incidentally marked him for its own. The mercenary in the pay of Zaragozan emirs is fabled as the model Spanish patriot; the plunderer of churches becomes the flower of orthodoxy; the cunning intriguer who rifled Jews and mocked at treaties is transfigured as the chivalrous paladin; the unsentimental trooper who never loved is delivered unto us as the typical jeune premier. Lastly, the mirror of Spanish nationality is best known by his Arabic title (Sidi = lord). Yet two points must be kept in mind: the facts which discredit him are reported by hostile Arab historians; and, again, the Cid is entitled to be judged by the standard of his country and his time. So judged, we may accept the verdict of his enemies, who cursed him as "a miracle of the miracles of God and the conqueror of banners." Ruy Diaz de Bivar—to give him his true name—was something more than a freebooter whose deeds struck the popular fancy: he stood for unity, for the supremacy of Castile over León, and his example proved that, against almost any odds, the Spaniards could hold their own against the Moors. In the long night between the disaster of Alarcos and the crowning triumph of Navas de Tolosa, the Cid's figure grew glorious as that of the man who had never despaired of his country, and in the hour of victory the legend of his inspiration was not forgotten. From his death at Valencia in 1099, his memory became a national possession, embellished by popular poetic fancy.

In the Poema the treatment is obviously modelled upon the Chanson de Roland. But there is a fixed intent to place the Spaniard first. The Cid is pictured as more human than Roland: he releases his prisoners without ransom; he gives them money so that they may reach their homes. Charlemagne, in the Chanson, destroys the idols in the mosques, baptizes a hundred thousand Saracens by force, hangs or flays alive the recalcitrant; the Cid shows such humanity to a conquered province that on his departure the Moors burst forth weeping, and pray for his prosperous voyage. The machinery in both cases is very similar. As the archangel Gabriel appears to Charlemagne, he appears likewise to the Cid Campeador. Bishop Turpin opens the battle in Roland, and Bishop Jerome heads the charge for Spain. Roland and Ruy Diaz are absolved and exhorted to the same effect, and the resemblance of the epithet curunez applied to the French bishop is too close to the coronado of the Spaniard to be accidental. But allowing for the fact that the Spanish juglar borrows his framework, his performance is great by virtue of its simplicity, its strength, its spirit and fire. Whether he deals with the hungry loyalty of the Cid in exile, or his reception into favour by an ingrate king; whether he celebrates the overthrow of the Count of Barcelona or the surrender of Valencia; whether he sings the nuptials of Elvira and Sol with the Infantes de Carrión, or the avenging Cid who seeks reparation from his craven son-in-law, the touch is always happy and is commonly final.

There is an unity of conception and of language which forbids our accepting the Poema as the work of several hands; and the division of the poem into separate cantares is managed with a discretion which argues a single artistic intelligence. The first part closes with the marriage of the hero's daughters; the second with the shame of the Infantes de Carrión, and the proud announcement that the kings of Spain are sprung from the Cid's loins. In both the singer rises to the level of his subject, but his chiefest gust is in the recital of some brilliant deed of arms. Judge him when, in a famous passage well rendered by Ormsby, he sings the charge of the Cid at Alcocer:—

"With bucklers braced before their breasts, with lances pointing low,

With stooping crests and heads bent down above the saddle-bow,

All firm of hand and high of heart they roll upon the foe.

And he that in a good hour was born, his clarion voice rings out,

And clear above the clang of arms is heard his battle-shout,

'Among them, gentlemen! Strike home for the love of charity!

The Champion of Bivar is here—Ruy Diaz—I am he!'

Then bearing where Bermuez still maintains unequal fight,

Three hundred lances down they come, their pennons flickering white;

Down go three hundred Moors to earth, a man to every blow;

And, when they wheel, three hundred more, as charging back they go.

It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day;

The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay;

The pennons that went in snow-white come out a gory red;

The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead;

While Moors call on Muhammad, and 'St. James!' the Christians cry."

Indubitably this (and it were easy to match it elsewhere in the Poema) is the work of an original genius who redeems his superficial borrowings of incident from Roland by a treatment all his own. That he knew the French models is evident from his skilful conveyance of the bear episode in Ider to his own pages, where the Cid encounters the beast as a lion. But the language shows no hint of French influence, and both thought and expression are profoundly national. The poet's name is irrecoverable, but the internal evidence points strongly to the conclusion that he came from the neighbourhood of Medina Celi. The surmise that he was an Asturian rests solely upon the absence of the diphthong ue from his lines, an inference on the face of it unwarrantable. Against this is the topographical minuteness with which the poet reports the sallies of the Cid in the districts of Castejón and Alcocer; his marked ignorance of the country round Zaragoza and Valencia, his detailed description of the central episode—the outrage upon the Cid's daughters in the wood of Corpes, near Berlanga; and the important fact that the four chief itineraries in the Poema are charged with minutiæ from Molina to San Esteban de Gormaz, while they grow vague and more confused as they extend towards Burgos and Valencia. The most probable conjecture, then, is that the unknown maker of this primitive masterpiece came from the Valle de Arbujuelo; and it is worth adding that this opinion is supported by the authority of Sr. Menéndez Pidal. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the early poet's worth is to be found in this: that his conception of his hero has outlived the true historic Cid, and has forced the child of his imagination upon the acceptance of mankind.

Even more fantastic is the personality of Ruy Diaz as rendered by the anonymous compiler of the Crónica Rimada (Rhymed Chronicle of Events in Spain from the Death of King Pelayo to Ferdinand the Great, and more especially of the Adventures of the Cid). The composition which bears this clumsy and inappropriate title is better named the Cantar de Rodrigo, and consists of 1125 lines, preceded by a scrap of rugged prose. Not till after digressions into other episodes, and irrelevant stories of Miro and Bernardo, Bishops of Palencia, probably fellow-townsmen of the compiler, does the Cid appear. He is no longer, as in the Poema, a popular hero, idealised from historic report; he is a purely imaginary figure, incrusted with a mass of fables accumulated in course of time. At the age of twelve he slays Gómez Górmaz (an almost impossible style, compounded of a patronymic and the name of a castle belonging to the Cid), is claimed by the dead man's daughter, weds her, vanquishes the Moors, and leads his King's—Fernando's—troops to the gates of Paris, defeating the Count of Savoy upon the road. One legend is heaped upon another, and the poem, the end of which is lost, breaks off with the Pope's request for a year's truce, which Fernando, acting as ever upon the Cid's advice, magnanimously extends for twelve years. It is hard to say whether the Cantar de Rodrigo as we have it is the production of a single composer, or whether it is a patchwork by different hands, arranged from earlier poems, and eked out by prose stories and by oral traditions. The versification is that of the simple sixteen-syllabled line, each hemistich of which forms a typical romance line. This in itself is a sign of its later date, and to this must be added the traces of deliberate imitation of the Poema, and the writer's familiarity with such modern devices as heraldic emblems. Further, the use of a Provençal form like gensor, the unmistakable tokens of French influence, the anticipation of the metre of the clerkly poems, the writer's frank admission of earlier songs on the same subject, the metamorphosis of the Cid into a feudal baron, and, above all, the decadent spirit of the entire work: these are tokens which imply a relative modernity. Much of the obscurity of language, which has been mistaken for archaism, is simply due to the defects of the manuscript; and the evidence goes to show that the Rodrigo, put together in the last decade of the twelfth century or the first of the thirteenth, was retouched in the fourteenth by Spanish juglares humiliated by the recent French invasions. Even so, much of the primitive pastiche remains, and the Rodrigo, which is mentioned in the General Chronicle, interests us as being the fountain-head of those romances on the Cid whose collection we owe to that enthusiastic and most learned investigator, Madame Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Far inferior in merit and interest to the Poema, the Rodrigo ranks with it as representative of the submerged mass of cantares de gesta, and is rightly valued as the venerable relic of a lost school.

To these succeed three anonymous poems, the Libro de Apolonio (Book of Apollonius), the Vida de Santa María Egipciaqua (Life of St. Mary the Egyptian), and the Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient (Book of the Three Eastern Kings), all discovered in one manuscript in the Escurial Library by Pedro José Pidal, and first published by him in 1844. The story of Apollonius, supposed to be a translation of a Greek romance, filters into European literature by way of the Gesta Romanorum, is found even in Icelandic and Danish versions, and is familiar to English readers of Pericles. The nameless Spanish arranger of the thirteenth century (probably a native of Aragón) gives the story of Apollonius' adventures with force and clearness, anticipating in the character of Tarsiana the type of Preciosa, the heroine of Cervantes' Gitanilla and of Weber's opera. Unfortunately the closing tags of moralisings on the vanity of life destroy the effect which the writer has produced by his free translation. His text is suffused with Provençalisms, and his mono-rhymed quatrains of fourteen syllables are evidence of French or Provençal origin. This metrical novelty, extending over more than six hundred stanzas, is properly regarded by the author as his chief distinction, and he implores God and the Virgin to guide him in the exercise of the new mastery (nueva maestría). It is fair to add that his experiment has the interest of novelty, that it succeeded beyond measure in its time, and that its monotonous vogue endured for some two hundred years.

To the same period belongs the Vida de Santa María Egipciaqua, the earliest Castilian example of verses of nine syllables. In substance it is a version of the Vie de Saint Marie l'Egyptienne, ascribed without much reason to the veritable Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (? 1175-1253), among whose Carmina Anglo-Normannica the French original is interpolated. The Spanish version follows the French lead with almost pedantic exactitude; but the metre, new and well suited to the common ear, is handled with an easy grace remarkable in a first effort. As happens with other works of this time, the title of the short Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient is misleading. The visit of the Magi is briefly dismissed in the first fifty lines, the poem turning chiefly upon the Flight into Egypt, the miracle wrought upon the leprous child of the robber, and the identification of the latter with the repentant thief of the New Testament. Like its predecessor, this legend is given in nine-syllabled verse, and is undoubtedly borrowed from a French or Provençal source not yet discovered.

In the Disputa del Alma y el Cuerpo (Argument betwixt Body and Soul), a subject which passes into all mediæval literatures from a copy of Latin verses styled Rixa Animi et Corporis, there is a recurrence, though with innumerable variants of measure, to the Alexandrine type. Thus it is sought to reproduce the music of the model, an Anglo-Norman poem, written in rhymed couplets of six syllables, and wrongly attributed to Walter Map. With it should go the Debate entre el Agua y el Vino (Debate between Water and Wine), and the first Castilian lyric, Razón feita d'Amor (the Lay of Love). Composed in verses of nine syllables, the poem deals with the meeting of two lovers, their colloquy, interchanges, and separation. Both pieces, discovered within the last seventeen years by M. Morel-Fatio, are the productions of a single mind. It is tempting to identify the writer with the Lope de Moros mentioned in the final line, "Lupus me feçit de Moros"; still the likelihood is that, here as elsewhere, the copyist has but signed his transcription. Whoever the author may have been—and the internal evidence tends to show that he was a clerk familiar with French, Provençal, Italian, or Portuguese exemplars—he shines by virtue of qualities which are akin to genius. His delicacy and variety of sentiment, his finish of workmanship, his deliberate lyrical effects, announce the arrival of the equipped artist, the craftsman no longer content with rhymed narration, the singer with a personal, distinctive note. Here was a poet who recognised that in literature—the least moral of the arts—the end justifies the means; hence he transformed the material which he borrowed, made it his own possession, and conveyed into Castile a new method adapted to her needs. But time and language were not yet ripe, and the Spanish lyric flourished solely in Galicia: it was not to be transplanted at a first attempt. Yet the attempt was worth the trial; for it closes the anonymous period with a triumph to which, if we except the Poema del Cid, it can show no fellow.

Footnote:

[2] Joannes Karl Thilo, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti. Lipsiæ, 1833. Pp. 254-261, 388-393.

CHAPTER III
THE AGE OF ALFONSO THE LEARNED, AND OF SANCHO
1220-1300

If we reject the claim of Lope de Moros to be the author of the Razón feita d'Amor, the first Castilian poet whose name reaches us is Gonzalo de Berceo (?1198-?1264), a secular priest attached to the Benedictine monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, in the diocese of Calahorra. A few details are known of him. He was certainly a deacon in 1220, and his name occurs in documents between 1237 and 1264. He speaks of his advanced age in the Vida de Santa Oria, Virgen, his latest and perhaps most finished work; and his birthplace, Berceo, is named in his Historia del Señor San Millán de Cogolla, as in his rhymed biography of St. Dominic of Silas. His copiousness runs to some thirteen thousand lines, including, besides the works already named, the Sacrificio de la Misa (Sacrifice of the Mass), the Martirio de San Lorenzo (Martyrdom of St. Lawrence), the Loores de Nuestra Señora (Praises of Our Lady), the Signos que aparecerán ante del Juicio (Signs visible before the Judgment), the Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Miracles of Our Lady), the Duelo que hizo la Virgen María el día de la Pasión de su hijo Jesucristo (The Virgin's Lament on the day of her Son's Passion), and three hymns to the Holy Ghost, the Virgin, and God the Father. In most editions of Berceo there is appended to his verses a poem in his praise, attributed to an unknown writer of the fourteenth century. This poem is, in fact, conjectured to be an invention of Tomás Antonio Sánchez, the earliest editor of Berceo's complete works (1779). The chances are that Berceo and his writings had passed out of remembrance within two hundred years of his death, and he was evidently unknown to Santillana in the fifteenth century. But a brief extract from him is given in the Moisén Segundo (Second Moses) of Ambrosio Gómez, published in 1653. With the exception of the Martirio de San Lorenzo, of which the end is lost, all Berceo's writings have been preserved, and he suffers by reason of his exuberance.

He sings in the vernacular, he declares, being too unlearned in the Latin; but he has his little pretensions. Though he calls himself a juglar, he marks the differences between his dictados (poems) and the cantares (songs) of a plain juglar, and he vindicates his title by that monotonous metre—the cuaderna vía—which was taken up in the Libro de Apolonio and became the model of all learned clerks in the next generations. Berceo uses the rhythm with success, and if his results are not splendid, it was not because he lacked perseverance. On the contrary, his industry was only too formidable. And, as a little of the mono-rhymed quatrain goes far, he must have perished had he depended upon execution. Beside Dante's achievement, as Puymaigre notes, the paraphrases of Berceo in the Sacrificio de la Misa (stanzas 250-266) seem thin and pale; but the comparison is unfair to the earlier Castilian singer, who died in his obscure hamlet without the advantage of Dante's splendid literary tradition. Berceo is hampered by his lack of imagination, by the poverty of his conditions, by the absence of models, by the narrow circle of his subjects, and by the pious scruples which hindered him from arabesquing the original design. Yet he possesses the gifts of simplicity and of unction, and amid his long digressions into prosy theological commonplace there are flashes of mystic inspiration unmatched by any other poet of his country and his time. Even when his versification, clear but hard, is at its worst, he accomplishes the end which he desires by popularising the pious legends which were dear to him. He was not—never could have been—a great poet. But in his own way he was, if not an inventor, the chief of a school, and the necessary predecessor of such devout authors as Luis de León and St. Teresa. He was a pioneer in the field of devout pastoral, with all the defects of the inexperienced explorer; and, for the most part, he had nothing to guide him but his own uncultured instinct. Some specimen of his work may be given in Hookham Frere's little-known fragmentary version of the Vida de San Millán:—

"He walked those mountains wild, and lived within that nook

For forty years and more, nor ever comfort took

Of offer'd food or alms, or human speech a look;

No other saint in Spain did such a penance brook.

For many a painful year he pass'd the seasons there,

And many a night consumed in penitence and prayer—

In solitude and cold, with want and evil fare,

His thoughts to God resigned, and free from human care.

Oh! sacred is the place, the fountain and the hill,

The rocks where he reposed, in meditation still,

The solitary shades through which he roved at will:

His presence all that place with sanctity did fill."

This is Berceo in a very characteristic vein, dealing with his own special saint in his chosen way—the way of the "new mastery"; and he keeps to the same rhythm in the nine hundred odd stanzas which he styles the Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Here his devotion inspires him to more conscientious effort; and it has been sought to show that Berceo takes his tales as he finds them in the Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, by the French trouvère, Gautier de Coinci, Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne (1177-1236). Certain it is that Gautier's source, the Soissons manuscript, was known to Alfonso the Learned, who mentions it in the sixty-first of his Galician songs as "a book full of miracles":—

"En Seixons ... un liuro a todo cheo de miragres."

There were doubtless earlier Latin collections—amongst others, Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum historiale and Pothon's Liber de miraculis Sanctæ Dei Genitricis Mariæ—which both Berceo and Alfonso used. But since Alfonso, a middle-aged man when Berceo died, knew the Soissons collection, it seems possible that Berceo also handled it. A close examination of his text converts the bare possibility into something approaching certainty. Of Berceo's twenty-five Marian legends, eighteen are given by Gautier de Coinci, whose total reaches fifty-five. This is not by itself final, for both writers might have selected them from a common source. Yet there are convincing proofs of imitation in the coincidences of thought and expression which are apparent in Gautier and Berceo. These are too numerous to be accidental; and still more weight must be given to the fact that in several cases where Gautier invents a detail of his own wit, Berceo reproduces it. Taken in conjunction with his known habit of strict adherence to his text, it follows that Berceo took Gautier for his guide. He did what all the world was doing in borrowing from the French, and in the Virgin's Lament he has the candour to confess the northern supremacy.

Still, it would be wrong to think that Berceo contents himself with mere servile reproduction, or that he trespasses in the manner of a vulgar plagiary. Seven of his legends he seeks elsewhere than in Gautier, and he takes it upon himself to condense his predecessor's diffuse narration. Thus, where Gautier needs 1350 lines to tell the legend of St. Ildefonsus, or 2090 to give the miracle of Theophilus, Berceo confines himself to 108 and to 657 lines. Gautier will spare you no detail; he will have you know the why, the when, the how, the paltriest circumstance of his pious story. Beside him Berceo shines by his power of selection, by his finer instinct for the essential, by his relative sobriety of tone, by his realistic eye, by his variety of resource in pure Castilian expression, by his richer melody, and by the fleeter movement of his action. In a word, with all his imperfections, Berceo approves himself the sounder craftsman of the two, and therefore he finds thirty readers where the Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne finds one. Small and few as his opportunities were, he rarely failed to use them to an advantage; as in the invention of the singular rhymed octosyllabic song—with its haunting refrain, Eya velar!—in the Virgin's Lament (stanzas 170-198). This argues a considerable lyrical gift, and the pity is that the most of Berceo's editors should have been at such pains to hide it from the reader.

In the ten thousand lines of the Libro de Alexandre are recounted the imaginary adventures of the Macedonian king, as told in Gautier de Lille's Alexandreis and in the versions of Lambert de Tort and Alexandre de Bernai. Traces of the Leonese dialect negative the ascription to Berceo, and the Juan Lorenzo Segura de Astorga mentioned in the last verses is a mere copyist. The Poema de Fernán González, due to a monk of San Pedro de Arlanza, embodies many picturesque and primitive legends in Berceo's manner. But the value of both these compositions is slight.

So much for verse. Castilian prose develops on parallel lines with it. A very early specimen is the didactic treatise called the Diez Mandamientos, written by a Navarrese monk, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, for the use of confessors. Somewhat later follow the Anales Toledanos, in two separate parts (the third is much more recent), composed between the years 1220 and 1250. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo (1170-1247), wrote a Latin Historia Gothica, which begins with the Gothic invasion, and ends at the year 1243. Undertaken at the bidding of St. Ferdinand of Castile, this work was summarised, and done into Castilian, probably by Jiménez de Rada himself, under the title of the Historia de los Godos. Its date would be the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, and to this same time (1241) belongs the Fuero Juzgo (Forum Judicum). This is a Castilian version of a code of so-called Gothic laws, substantially Roman in origin, given by St. Ferdinand (1200-1252) to the Spaniards settled in Córdoba and other southern cities after the reconquest; but though of extreme value to the philologer, its literary interest is too slight to detain us here. Two most brilliant specimens of early Spanish prose are the letters supposed to have been written by the dying Alexander to his mother; and the accident of their being found in the manuscript copied by Lorenzo Segura de Astorga has led to their being printed at the end of the Libro de Alexandre. There is good reason for thinking that they are not by the author of that poem; and, in truth, they are mere translations. Both letters are taken from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī's Arabic collection of moral sentences; the first is found in the Bonium (so called from its author, a mythical King of Persia), and the second on the Castilian version of the Secretum Secretorum, of which the very title is reproduced as Poridat de las Poridades. Further examples of progressive prose are found in the Libro de los doce Sabios, which deals with the political education of princes, and may have been drawn up by the direction of St. Ferdinand. But the authorship and date of these compilations are little better than conjectural.

These are the preliminary essays in the stuff of Spanish prose. Its permanent form was received at the hands of Alfonso the Learned (1226-84), who followed his father, St. Ferdinand, to the Castilian throne in 1252. Unlucky in his life, balked of his ambition to wear the title of Emperor, at war with Popes, his own brothers, his children, and his people, Alfonso has been hardly entreated after death. Mariana, the greatest of Spanish historians, condenses the vulgar verdict in a Tacitean phrase: Dum cœlum considerat terra amissit. A mountain of libellous myth has overlaid Alfonso's fame. Of all the anecdotes concerning him, the best known is that which reports him as saying, "Had God consulted me at the creation of the world, He would have made it differently." This deliberate invention is due to Pedro IV. (the Ceremonious); and if Pedro foresaw the result, he must have been a scoundrel of genius. Fortunately, nothing can rob Alfonso of his right to be considered, not only as the father of Castilian verse, but as the centre of all Spanish intellectual life. Political disaster never caused his intellectual activity to slacken. Like Bacon, he took all knowledge for his province, and in every department he shone pre-eminent. Astronomy, music, philosophy, canon and civil law, history, poetry, the study of languages: he forced his people upon these untrodden roads. To catalogue the series of his scientific enterprises, and to set down the names of his Jewish and Arab collaborators, would give ample work to a bibliographer. Both the Tablas Alfonsis and the colossal Libros del Saber de Astronomía (Books on the Science of Astronomy) are packed with minute corrections of Ptolemy, in whose system the learned King seems to have suspected an error; but their present interest lies in the historic fact, that with their compilation Castilian makes its first great stride in the direction of exactitude and clearness.

Similar qualities of precision and ease were developed in encyclopædic treatises like the Septenario[3] which, together with the Fuero Juzgo, Alfonso drew up in his father's lifetime; and in practical guides such as the Juegos de Açedrex, Dados, et Tablas (Book of Chess, Dice, and Chequers). This miraculous activity astounded contemporaries, and posterity has multiplied the wonder by attributing well-nigh every possible anonymous work to the man whose real activity is a marvel. It has been sought to prove him the author of the Libro de Alexandre, the writer of Alexander's Letters, the compiler of treatises on the chase, the translator of Kalilah and Dimnah, and innumerable more pieces. Not one of these can be brought home to him, and some belong to a later time. Ticknor, again, foists on Alfonso two separate works each entitled the Tesoro, and the authorship has been accepted upon that authority. It is therefore necessary to state the real case. The one Tesoro is a prose translation of Brunetto Latini's Li Livres dou Trésor made by Alfonso de Paredes and Pero Gómez, respectively surgeon and secretary at the court of Sancho, Alfonso's son and successor; the other Tesoro, with its prose preamble and forty-eight stanzas, is a forgery vamped by some parasite in the train of Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, during the fifteenth century.

Alonso de Fuentes, writing three hundred years after Alfonso's death, names him as author of a celebrated romance—"I left behind my native land"; the rhythm and accentuation prove the lines to belong to a fifteenth-century maker whose attribution of them to the King is palpably dramatic. Great authorities accept as authentic the Libro de Querellas (Book of Plaints), which is represented by two fine stanzas addressed to Diego Sarmiento, "brother and friend and vassal leal" of "him whose foot was kissed by kings, him from whom queens sought alms and grace." One is sorry to lose them, but they must be rejected. No such book is known to any contemporary; the twelve-syllabled octave in which the stanzas are written was not invented till a hundred years later; and these two stanzas are simply fabrications by Pellicer, who first published them in the seventeenth century in his Memoir on the House of Sarmiento, with a view to flattering his patron.

This to some extent clears the ground: but not altogether. Setting aside minor legal and philosophic treatises which Alfonso may have supervised, it remains to speak of more important matters. A great achievement is the code called, from the number of its divisions, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts). This name does not appear to have been attached to the code till a hundred years after its compilation; but it may be worth observing that the notion is implied in the name of the Septenario, and that Alfonso, regarding the number seven as something of mysterious potency, exhausts himself in citing precedents—the seven days of the week, seven metals, seven arts, seven years that Jacob served, seven lean years in Egypt, the seven-branched candlestick, seven sacraments, and so on. The trait is characteristic of the time. It would be a grave mistake to suppose that the Siete Partidas in any way resembles a modern book of statutes, couched in the technical jargon of the law. Its primary object was the unification of the various clashing systems of law which Alfonso encountered within his unsettled kingdom; and this he accomplished with such success that all subsequent Spanish legislation derives from the Siete Partidas, which are still to some extent in force in the republican states of Florida and Louisiana. But the design soon outgrows mere practical purpose, and expands into dissertations upon general principles and the pettier details of conduct.

Sancho Panza, as Governor of Barataria, could not have bettered the counsels of the Siete Partidas, whose very titles force a smile: "What things men should blush to confess, and what not," "Why no monk should study law or physics," "Why the King should abstain from low talk," "Why the King should eat and drink moderately," "Why the King's children should be taught to be cleanly," "How to draw a will so that the witnesses shall not know its tenor," with other less prudish discussions. The reading of this code is not merely instructive and curious; apart from its dry humouristic savour, the Siete Partidas rises to a noble eloquence when the subject is the common weal, the office of the ruler, his relations to his people, and the interdependence of Church and State. No man, by his single effort, could draw a code of such intricacy and breadth, and it is established that Jacobo Ruiz and Fernán Martínez laboured on it; but Alfonso's is the supreme intelligence which appoints and governs, and his is the revising hand which leaves the text in its perfect verbal form.

In history, too, Alfonso sought distinction; and he found it. The Crónica or Estoria de Espanna, composed between the years 1260 and 1268, the General e grand Estoria, begun in 1270, owe to him their inspiration. The latter, ranging from the Creation to Apostolic times, glances at such secular events as the Babylonian Empire and the fall of Troy; the former extends from the peopling of Europe by the sons of Japhet to the death of St. Ferdinand. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and Lucas de Tuy are the direct authorities, and their testimonies are completed by elaborate references that stretch from Pliny to the cantares de gesta. Moreover, the Arab chronicles are avowedly utilised in the account of the Cid's exploits: "thus says Abenfarax in his Arabic whence this history is derived." A singular circumstance is the inferiority of style in these renderings from the Arabic. Elsewhere a strange ignorance of Arabs and their history is shown by the compiler's inclusion of such fables as Muhammad's crusade in Córdoba. The inevitable conclusion is that the Estorias, like the Siete Partidas, are compilations by several hands; and the idea is supported by the fact that the prologue to the Estoria de Espanna is scarcely more than a translation of Jiménez de Rada's preface.

Late traditions give the names of Alfonso's collaborators in one or the other History as Egidio de Zamora, Jofre de Loaysa, Martín de Córdoba, Suero Pérez, Bishop of Zamora, and Garci Fernández de Toledo; and even though these attributions be (as seems likely) a trifle fantastical, they at least indicate a long-standing disbelief in the unity of authorship. It is proved that Alfonso gathered from Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, and Paris some fifty experts to translate Ptolemy's Quadri partitum and other astronomic treatises; it is natural that he should organise a similar committee to put together the first history in the Castilian language. Better than most of his contemporaries, he knew the value of combination. As with astronomy so with history: in both cases he conceived the scheme, in both cases he presided at the redaction and stamped the crude stuff with his distinctive seal. Judged by a modern standard, both Estorias lend themselves to a cheap ridicule; compared with their predecessors, they imply a finer appreciation of the value of testimony, and this notable evolution of the critical sense is matched by a manner that rises to the theme. Side by side with a greater care for chronology, there is a keener edge of patriotism which leads the compilers to embody in their text whole passages of lost cantares de gesta. And these are no purple patches: the expression is throughout dignified without pomp, and easy without familiarity. Spanish prose sheds much of its uncouthness, and takes its definitive form in such a passage as that upon the Joys of Spain: "More than all, Spain is subtle,—ay! and terrible, right skilled in conflict, mirthful in labour, stanch to her lord, in letters studious, in speech courtly, fulfilled of gifts; never a land the earth overlong to match her excellence, to rival her bravery; few in the world as mighty as she." It may be lawful to believe that here we catch the personal accent of the King.

Compilations abound in which Alfonso is said to have shared, but they are of less importance than his Cantigas de Santa María (Canticles of the Virgin)—four hundred and twenty pieces, written and set to music in the Virgin's praise. Strictly speaking, these do not belong to Castilian literature, being written in the elaborate Galician language, which now survives as little better than a dialect. But they must be considered if we are to form any just idea of Alfonso's accomplishments and versatility. At the outset a natural question suggests itself: "Why should the King of Castile, after drawing up his code in Castilian, write his verses in Galician?" The answer is simple: "For the reason that he was an artist." Velázquez, indeed, asserts that Alfonso was reared in Galicia; but this is assertion, not evidence. The real motive of the choice was the superior development of the Galician, which so far outpassed the Castilian in flexibility and grace as to invite comparison with the Provençal. Troubadours in full flight from the Albigensian wars found grace at Alfonso's court; Aimeric de Belenoi, Nat de Mons, Calvo, Riquier, Lunel, and more.

That Alfonso wrote in Provençal seems probable enough, especially as he derides the incapacity in this respect of his father's trovador, Pero da Ponte; still, the two Provençal pieces which bear his name are spurious, and are the work of Nat de Mons and Riquier. Howbeit, the Provençal spell mastered him, and drove him to reproduce its elaborate rhythms. The first impression given by the Cantigas is one of unusual metrical resource. Verses of four syllables, of five, octosyllabics, hendecasyllabics, are among the singer's experiments. From the popular coplas, not unlike the modern seguidillas, he strays to the lumbering line of seventeen syllables; in five strophes he commits an acrostic as the name María; and half a thousand years before Matilda's lover went to Göttingen, he anticipates Canning's freak in the Anti-Jacobin by splitting up a word to achieve a difficult rhyme; he abuses the refrain by insistent repetition, so as to give the echo of a litany, or fit the ready-made melody of a juglar (clxxii.);—puerilities perhaps, but characteristic of a school and an epoch. Subjects are taken as they come, preference being given to the more universal version, and local legends taking a secondary place. A living English poet has merited great praise for his Ballad of a Nun. Six hundred years before Mr. Davidson, Alfonso gave six splendid variants of the famous story. Two men of genius have treated the legend of the statue and the ring—Prosper Mérimée in his Vénus d'Ille, and Heine in Les Dieux en Exile—with splendid effect. Alfonso (xlii.) anticipated them by rendering the story in verses of incomparable beauty, pregnant with mystery and terror.

For his part, Alfonso rifles Vincent de Beauvais, Gautier de Coinci, Berceo, and, in his encyclopædic way, borrows a hint from the old Catalan Planctus Mariæ Virginis; but his touch transmutes bold hagiology to measures of harmony and distinction. He was not—it cannot be claimed for him—a poet of supreme excellence; yet, if he fail to reach the topmost peaks, he vindicates his choice of a medium by outstripping his predecessors, and by pointing the path to those who succeed him. With the brain of a giant he combined the heart of a little child, and, technique apart, this amalgam which wrought his political ruin was his poetic salvation. Still an artist, even when he stumbles into the ditch, his metrical dexterity persists in such brutally erotic and satiric verse as he contributes to the Vatican Cancioneiro (Nos. 61-79). Withal, he survives by something better than mere virtuosity; for his simplicity and sincere enthusiasm, sundered from the prevalent affectation of his contemporaries, ensure him a place apart.

His example in so many fields of intellectual exercise was followed. What part he took (if any) in preparing Kalilah and Dimnah is not settled. The Spanish version, probably made before Alfonso's accession to the throne, derives straight from the Arabic, which, in its turn, is rendered by Abd Allah ibn al-Mukaffa (754-775) from Barzoyeh's lost Pehlevī (Old Persian) translations of the original Sanskrit. This last has disappeared, though its substance survives in the remodelled Panchatantra, and from it descend the variants that are found in almost all European literatures. The period of the Spanish rendering is hard to determine exactly, but 1251 is the generally accepted date, and its vogue is proved by the use made of it by Raimond de Béziers in his Latin version (1313). It does not appear to have been used by Raimond Lull (1229-1315), the celebrated Doctor illuminatus, in his Catalan Beast-Romance, inserted in the Libre de Maravelles about the year 1286. The value of the Spanish lies in the excellence of the narrative manner, and in its reduction of the oriental apologue to terms of the vernacular. Alfonso's brother, Fadrique, followed the lead in his Engannos é Assayamientos de las Mogieres (Crafts and Wiles of Women), which is referred to 1253, and is translated from the Arabic version of a lost Sanskrit original, after the fashion of Kalilah and Dimnah.

Translation is continued at the court of Alfonso's son and successor, Sancho IV. (d. 1295), who, as already noted, commands a version of Brunetto Latini's Tesoro; and the encyclopædic mania takes shape in a work entitled the Luçidario, a series of one hundred and six chapters, which begins by discussing "What was the first thing in heaven and earth?" and ends with reflections on the habits of animals and the whiteness of negroes' teeth. The Gran Conquista de Ultramar (Great Conquest Oversea) is a perversion of the history originally given by Guillaume de Tyr (d. 1184), mixed with other fabulous elements, derived perhaps from the French, and certainly from the Provençal, which thus comes for the first time in direct contact with Castilian prose. The fragmentary Provençal Chanson d'Antioche which remains can scarcely be the original form in which it was composed by its alleged author, Grégoire de Bechada: at best it is a rifacimento of a previous draught. But that it was used by the Spanish translator has been amply demonstrated by M. Gaston Paris. The translator has been identified with King Sancho himself; the safer opinion is that the work was undertaken by his order during his last days, and was finished after his death.

With these should be classed compilations like the Book of Good Proverbs, translated from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī; the Bonium or Bocados de Oro, from the collections of Abu 'l Wafā Mubashshir ibn Fātik, part of which was Englished by Lord Rivers, and thence conveyed into Caxton's Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers; and the Flowers of Philosophy, a treatise composed of thirty-eight chapters of fictitious moral sentences uttered by a tribe of thinkers, culminating—fitly enough for a Spanish book—in Seneca of Córdoba. In dealing with these works it is impossible to speak precisely as to source and date: the probability is that they were put together during the reign of Sancho, who was his father's son in more than the literal sense. Like Alfonso's, his ambition was to force his people into the intellectual current of the age, and in default of native masterpieces he supplied them with foreign models whence the desired masterpieces might proceed; and, like his father, Sancho himself entered the lists with his Castigos y Documentos (Admonitions and Exhortations), ninety chapters designed for the guidance of his son. This production, disfigured by the ostentatious erudition of the Middle Ages, is saved from death by its shrewd common-sense, by its practical counsel, and by the admirable purity and lucidity of style that formed the most valuable asset in Sancho's heritage. With him the literature of the thirteenth century comes to a dramatic close: the turbulent fighter, whose rebellion cut short his father's days, becomes the conscientious promoter of his father's literary tradition.

Footnote:

[3] So called because it embraced the seven subjects of learning: the trivio (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and the quadrivio (music, astrology, physics, and metaphysics).

CHAPTER IV
THE DIDACTIC AGE
1301-1400

Only the barest mention need be made of a "clerkly poem" called the Vida de San Ildefonso (Life of St. Ildephonsus), a dry narrative of over a thousand lines, probably written soon after 1313, when the saint's feast was instituted by the Council of Peñafiel. Its author declares that he once held the prebend of Úbeda, and that he had previously rhymed the history of the Magdalen. No other information concerning him exists; nor is it eagerly sought, for the Prebendary's poem is a colourless imitation of Berceo, without Berceo's visitings of inspiration. More merit is shown in the Proverbios en Rimo de Salomón (Solomon's Rhymed Proverbs), moralisings on the vanity of life, written, with many variations, in the manner of Berceo. The author of these didactic, satiric verses is announced in the oldest manuscript copy as one Pero Gómez, son of Juan Fernández. He has been absurdly confounded with an ancient "Gómez, trovador," and, more plausibly, with the Pero Gómez who collaborated with Paredes in translating Brunetto Latini's Tesoro; but the name is too common to allow of precise opinion as to the real author, whom some have taken for Pero López de Ayala. Whoever the writer, he possessed a pleasant gift of satirical observation, and a knowledge of men and affairs which he puts to good use, with few lapses upon the merely trite and banal.

Of more singular interest is the incomplete Poema de José or Historia de Yusuf, named by the writer, Al-hadits de Jusuf. This curious monument, due doubtless to some unconverted Mudéjar of Toledo, is the typical example of the literature called aljamiada. The language is correct Castilian of the time, and the metre, sustained for 312 stanzas, is the right Bercean: the peculiarity lies in the use of Arabic characters in the phonetic transcription. A considerable mass of such compositions has been discovered (and in the discovery England has taken part); but of them all the Historia de Yusuf is at once the best and earliest. It deals with the story of Joseph in Egypt, not according to the Old Testament narrative, but in general conformity with the version found in the eleventh sura of the Ku'rān, though the writer does not hesitate to introduce variants and amplifications of his own invention, as (stanza 31) when the wolf speaks to the patriarch whose son it is supposed to have slain. The persecution of Joseph by Potiphar's wife, who figures as Zulija (Zuleikah), is told with considerable spirit, and the mastery of the cuaderna vía (the Bercean metre of four fourteen-syllabled lines rhymed together) is little short of amazing in a foreigner. At whiles an Arabic word creeps into the text, and the invocation of Allah, with which the poem opens, is repeated in later stanzas; but, taken as a whole, apart from the oriental colouring inseparable from the theme, there is a marked similarity of tone between the Historia de Yusuf and its predecessors the "clerkly poems." An oriental subject handled by an Arab gave the best possible opportunity for introducing orientalism in the treatment; the occasion is eschewed, and the lettered Arab studiously follows in the wake of Berceo and the other Castilian models known to him. There could scarcely be more striking evidence of the irresistible progress of Castilian modes of thought and expression. The Arabic influence, if it ever existed, was already dead.

Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, near Guadalajara, is the greatest name in early Castilian literature. The dates of his birth and death are not known. A line in his Libro de Cantares (stanza 1484) inclines us to believe that, like Cervantes, he was a native of Alcalá de Henares; but Guadalajara also claims him for her own, and a certain Francisco de Torres reports him as living there so late as 1415. This date is incompatible with other ascertained facts in Ruiz' career. We learn from a note at the end of his poems that "this is the book of the Archpriest of Hita, which he wrote, being imprisoned by order of the Cardinal Don Gil, Archbishop of Toledo." Now, Gil Albornoz held the see between the years 1337 and 1367; and another clerk, named Pedro Fernández, was Archpriest of Hita in 1351. Most likely Juan Ruiz was born at the close of the thirteenth century, and died, very possibly in gaol, before his successor was appointed. On the showing of his own writings, Juan Ruiz was a cleric of irregular life at a time when disorder was at its worst, and his thirteen years in prison proclaim him a Goliard of the loosest kind. He testifies against himself with a splendid candour; and yet there have been critics who insisted on idealising this libidinous clerk into a smug Boanerges. There was never a more grotesque travesty, a more purblind misunderstanding of facts and the man.

The Archpriest was a fellow of parts and of infinite fancy. He does, indeed, allege that he supplies, "incentives to good conduct, injunctions towards salvation, to be understanded of the people and to enable folk to guard against the trickeries which some practise in pursuit of foolish loves." He comes pat with a text from Scripture quoted for his own purpose:—"Intellectum tibi dabo, et instruam te in via hac, qua gradieris." He passes from David to Solomon, and, with his tongue in his cheek, transcribes his versicle:—"Initium sapientiæ timor Domini." St. John, Job, Cato, St. Gregory, the Decretals—he calls them all into court to witness his respectable intention, and at a few lines' distance he unmasks in a passage which prudish editors have suppressed:—"Yet, since it is human to sin, if any choose the ways of love (which I do not recommend), the modes thereof are recounted here;" and so forth, in detail the reverse of edifying. Ovid's erotic verses are freely rendered, the Archpriest's unsuccessful battle against love is told, and the liturgy is burlesqued in the procession of "clerks and laymen and monks and nuns and duennas and gleemen to welcome love into Toledo." The attempt to exhibit Ruiz as an edifying citizen is, on the face of it, absurd.

Much that he wrote is lost, but the seventeen hundred stanzas that remain suffice for any reputation. Juan Ruiz strikes the personal note in Castilian literature. To distinguish the works of the clerkly masters, to declare with certainty that this Castilian piece was written by Alfonso and that by Sancho, is a difficult and hazardous matter. Not so with Ruiz. The stamp of his personality is unmistakable in every line. He was bred in the old tradition, and he long abides by the rules of the mester de clerecía; but he handles it with a freedom unknown before, imparts to it a new flexibility, a variety, a speed, a music beyond all precedent, and transfuses it with a humour which anticipates Cervantes. Nay, he does more. In his prose preface he asserts that he chiefly sought to give examples of prosody, of rhyme and composition:—"Dar algunas lecciones, é muestra de versificar, et rimar et trobar." And he followed the bent of his natural genius. He had an infinitely wider culture than any of his predecessors in verse. All that they knew he knew—and more; and he treated them in the true cavalier spirit of the man who feels himself a master. His famous description of the tent of love is manifestly suggested by the description of Alexander's tent in the Libro de Alexandre. The entire episode of Doña Endrina is paraphrased from the Liber de Amore, attributed to the Pseudo-Ovid, the Auvergnat monk who hides beneath the name of Pamphilus Maurilianus.

French fableaux were rifled by Ruiz without a scruple, though he had access to their great originals in the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus; for to his mind the improved treatment was of greater worth than the mere bald story. He was familiar with the Kalilah and Dimnah, with Fadrique's Crafts and Wiles of Women, perhaps with the apologues of Lull and Juan Manuel. Vast as his reading was, it had availed him nothing without his superb temperament, his gift of using it to effect. Vaster still was his knowledge of men, his acquaintance with the seamy side of life, his interest in things common and rare, his observation of manners, and his lyrical endowment. The name of "the Spanish Petronius" has been given to him; yet, despite a superficial resemblance between the two, it is a misnomer. Far nearer the truth, though the Spaniard lacks the dignity of the Englishman, is Ticknor's parallel with Chaucer. Like Chaucer, Ruiz had an almost incomparable gust for life, an immitigable gaiety of spirit, which penetrates his transcription of the Human Comedy. Like Chaucer, his adventurous curiosity led him to burst the bonds of the prison-house and to confer upon his country new rhythms and metres. His four cánticas de serrana, suggested by the Galician makers, anticipate by a hundred years the serranillas and the vaqueiras of Santillana, and entitle him to rank as the first great lyric poet of Castile. Ruiz, likewise, had a Legend of Women; but his reading was his own, and Chaucer's adjective cannot be applied to it. His ambition is, not to idealise, but to realise existence, and he interprets its sensuous animalism in the spirit of picaresque enjoyment. Jewesses, Moorish dancers, the procuress Trota-conventos, her finicking customers, the loose nuns, great ladies, and brawny daughters of the plough,—Ruiz renders them with the merciless exactitude of Velázquez.

The arrangement of Ruiz' verse, disorderly as his life, foreshadows the loose construction of the picaresque novel, of which his own work may be considered the first example. One of his greatest discoveries is the rare value of the autobiographic form. Mingled with parodies of hymns, with burlesques of old cantares de gesta, with glorified paraphrases of both Ovids (the true and the false), with versions of oriental fables read in books or gathered from the lips of vagrant Arabs, with peculiar wealth of popular refrains and proverbs—with these goes the tale of the writer's individual life, rich in self-mockery, gross in thought, abundant in incident, splendid in expression, slyly edifying in the moral conclusion which announces an immediate relapse. Poet, novelist, expert in observation, irony, and travesty, Ruiz had, moreover, the sense of style in such measure as none before him and few after him, and to this innate faculty of selection he joined a great capacity for dramatic creation. Hence the impossibility of exhibiting him in elegant extracts, and hence the permanence of his types. The most familiar figure of Lazarillo de Tormes—the starving gentleman—is a lineal descendant of Ruiz' Don Furón, who is scrupulous in observing facts so long as there is nothing to eat; and Ruiz' two lovers, Melón de la Uerta and Endrina de Calatayud, are transferred as Calisto and Melibea to Rojas' tragi-comedy, whence they pass into immortality as Romeo and Juliet. Lastly, Ruiz' repute might be staked upon his fables, which, by their ironic appreciation, their playful wit and humour, seem to proceed from an earlier, ruder, more virile La Fontaine.

Contemporary with Juan Ruiz was the Infante Juan Manuel (1282-1347), grandson of St. Ferdinand and nephew of Alfonso the Learned. In his twelfth year he served against the Moors on the Murcian frontier, became Mayordomo to Fernando IV., and succeeded to the regency shortly after that King's death in 1312. Mariana's denunciation of "him who seemed born solely to wreck the state" fits Juan Manuel so exactly that it is commonly applied to him; but, in truth, its author intended it for another Don Juan (without the "Manuel"), uncle of the boy-king, Alfonso XI. Upon the regency followed a spell of wars, broils, rebellions, assassinations, wherein King and ex-Regent were pitted against each other. Neither King nor soldier bore malice, and the latter shared in the decisive victory of Salado and—perhaps with Chaucer's Gentle Knight—in the siege of Algezir (Algeciras). Fifty years of battle would fill most men's lives; but the love of literature ran in the blood of Juan Manuel's veins, and, like others of his kindred, he proved the truth of the old Castilian adage:—"Lance never blunted pen, nor pen lance."

He set a proper value on himself and his achievement. In the General Introduction to his works he foresees, so he announces, that his books must be often copied, and he knows that this means error:—"as I have seen happen in other copies, either because of the transcriber's dulness, or because the letters are much alike." Wherefore Juan Manuel prepared, so to say, a copyright edition, with a prefatory bibliography, whose deficiencies may be supplemented by a second list given at the beginning of his Conde Lucanor. And he closes his General Introduction with this prayer:—"And I beg all those who may read any of the books I made not to blame me for whatever ill-written thing they find, until they see it in this volume which I myself have arranged." His care seemed excessive: it proved really insufficient, since the complete edition which he left to the monastery at Peñafiel has disappeared. Some of his works are lost to us, as the Book of Chivalry,[4] a treatise dealing with the Engines of War, a Book of Verses, the Art of Poetic Composition (Reglas como se debe Trovar), and the Book of Sages. The loss of the Book of Verses is a real calamity; all the more that it existed at Peñafiel as recently as the time of Argote de Molina (1549-90), who meant to publish it. Juan Manuel's couplets and quatrains of four, eight, eleven, twelve, and fourteen syllables, his arrangement (Enxemplo XVI.) of the octosyllabic redondilla in the Conde Lucanor, prove him an adept in the Galician form, an irreproachable virtuoso in his art. It seems almost certain that his Book of Verses included many remarkable exercises in political satire; and, in any case, his example and position must have greatly influenced the development of the courtly school of poets at Juan II.'s court.

A treatise like his Libro de Caza (Book of Hawking), recently recovered by Professor Baist, needs but to be mentioned to indicate its aim. His histories are mere epitomes of Alfonso's chronicle. The Libro del Caballero et del Escudero (Book of the Knight and Squire), in fifty-one chapters, of which some thirteen are missing, is a didacticism, a fabliella, modelled upon Ramón Lull's Libre del Orde de Cavallería. A hermit who has abandoned war instructs an ambitious squire in the virtues of chivalry, and sends him to court, whence he returns "with much wealth and honour." The inquiry begins anew, and the hermit expounds to his companion the nature of angels, paradise, hell, the heavens, the elements, the art of posing questions, the stuff of the planets, sea, earth, and all that is therein—birds, fish, plants, trees, stones, and metals. In some sort the Tratado sobre las Armas (Treatise on Arms) is a memoir of the writer's house, containing a powerful presentation of the death of Juan Manuel's guardian, King Sancho, passing to eternity beneath his father's curse.

Juan Manuel follows Sancho's example by preparing twenty-six chapters of Castigos (Exhortations), sometimes called the Libro infinido, or Unfinished Book, addressed to his son, a boy of nine. He reproduces Sancho's excellent manner and sound practical advice without the flaunting erudition of his cousin. The Castigos are suspended to supply the monk, Juan Alfonso, with a treatise on the Modes of Love, fifteen in number; being, in fact, an ingenious discussion on friendship. Juan Manuel is seen almost at his best in his Libro de los Estados (Book of States), otherwise the Book of the Infante, and thought by some to be the missing Book of Sages. The allegorical didactic vein is worked to exhaustion in one hundred and fifty chapters, which relate the education of the pagan Morován's son, Johas, by a certain Turín, who, unable to satisfy his pupil, calls to his aid the celebrated preacher Julio. After interminable discussions and resolutions of theological difficulties, the story ends in the baptism of father, son, and tutor. Gayangos gives us the key; Johas is Juan Manuel; Morován is his father, Manuel; Turín is Pero López de Ayala, grandfather of the future Chancellor; and Julio represents St. Dominic (who, as a matter of fact, died before Juan Manuel's father was born). This confused philosophic story, suggestive of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, is in truth the vehicle for conveying the author's ideas on every sort of question, and it might be described without injustice as the carefully revised commonplace book of an omnivorous reader with a care for form. A postscript to the Book of States is the Book of Preaching Friars, a summary of the Dominican constitution expounded by Julio to his pupil. A very similar dissertation is the Treatise showing that the Blessed Mary is, body and soul, in Paradise, directed to Remón Masquefa, Prior of Peñafiel.

Juan Manuel's masterpiece is the Conde Lucanor (also named the Book of Patronio and the Book of Examples), in four parts, the first of which is divided into fifty-one chapters. Like the Decamerone, like the Canterbury Tales—but with greater directness—the Conde Lucanor is the oriental apologue embellished in terms of the vernacular. The convention of the "moral lesson" is maintained, and each chapter of the First Part (the others are rather unfinished notes) ends with a declaration to the effect that "when Don Johan heard this example he found it good, ordered it to be set down in this book, and added these verses"—the verses being a concise summary of the prose. The Conde Lucanor is the Spanish equivalent of the Arabian Nights, with Patronio in the part of Scheherazade, and Count Lucanor (as who should say Juan Manuel) as the Caliph. Boccaccio used the framework first in Italy, but Juan Manuel was before him by six years, for the Conde Lucanor was written not later than 1342. The examples are taken from experience, and are told with extraordinary narrative skill. Simplicity of theme is matched by simplicity of expression. The story of father and son (Enxemplo II.), of the Dean of Santiago and the Toledan Magician (Enxemplo XI.), of Ferrant González and Nuño Laynez, a model of dramatic presentation (Enxemplo XVI.), are perfect masterpieces in little.

Juan Manuel is an innovator in Castilian prose, as is Juan Ruiz in Castilian verse. He lacks the merriment, the genial wit of the Archpriest; but he has the same gift of irony, with an added note of cutting sarcasm, and a more anxious research for the right word. He never forgets that he has been the Regent of Castile, that he has mingled with kings and queens, that he has cowed emirs and barons, and led his troopers at the charge; and it is well that he never unbends, since his unsmiling patrician humour gives each story a keener point. In mind as in blood he is the great Alfonso's kinsman, and the relation becomes evident in his treatment of the prose sentence. He inherited it with many another splendid tradition, and, while he preserves entire its stately clearness, he polishes to concision; he sets with conscience to the work, sharpening the edges of his instrument, exhibits its possibilities in the way of trenchancy, and puts it to subtler uses than heretofore. In his hands Castilian prose acquires a new ductility and finish, and his subjects are such that dramatists of genius have stooped to borrow from him. In him (Enxemplo XLV.) is the germ of the Taming of the Shrew (though it is scarcely credible that Shakespeare lifted it direct), and from him Calderón takes not merely the title—Count Lucanor—of a play, but the famous apologue in the first act of Life is a Dream, an adaptation to the stage of one of Juan Manuel's best instances (Enxemplo XXXI.). Pilferings by Le Sage are things of course, and Gil Blas benefits by its author's reading. Translations apart—and they are forthcoming—the Conde Lucanor is one of the books of the world, and each reading of it makes more sensible the loss of the verses which, one would fain believe, might place the writer as high among poets as among prose writers.

The Poema de Alfonso Onceno, also known as his Rhymed Chronicle, was unearthed at Granada in 1573 by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, and an extract from it, printed fifteen years later by Argote de Molina, encouraged the idea that Alfonso XI. wrote it. That King's sole exploit in literature is a handbook on venery, often attributed to Alfonso the Learned. The fuller, but still incomplete text of the Poema, first published in 1864, discloses (stanza 1841) the author's name as Rodrigo Yañez or Yannes. It is to be noted that he speaks of rendering Merlin's prophecy in the Castilian tongue:—

"Yo Rodrigo Yannes la noté

En lenguaje castellano."

Everything points to his having translated from a Galician original, being himself a Galician who hispaniolised his name of Rodrigo Eannes. Strong arguments in favour of this theory are advanced by great authorities—Professor Cornu, and that most learned lady, Mme. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. In the first place, the many technical defects of the Poema vanish upon translation into Galician; and next, the verses are laced with allusions to Merlin, which indicate a familiarity with Breton legends, common enough in Galicia and Portugal, but absolutely unknown in Spain. Be that as it prove, the Poema interests as the last expression of the old Castilian epic. Here we have, literally, the swan-song of the man-at-arms, chanting the battles in which he shared, commemorating the names of comrades foremost in the van, reproducing the martial music of the camp juglar, observing the set conventions of the cantares de gesta. His last appearance on any stage is marked by a portent—the suppression of the tedious Alexandrine, and the resolution into two lines of the sixteen-syllabled verse. Yañez is an excellent instance of the third-rate man, the amateur, who embodies, if he does not initiate, a revolution. His own system of octosyllabics in alternate rhymes has a sing-song monotony which wearies by its facile copiousness, and inspiration visits him at rare and distant intervals. But the step that costs is taken, and a place is prepared for the young romance in literature.

No precise information offers concerning Rabbi Sem Tob of Carrión, the first Jew who writes at length in Castilian. His dedication to Pedro the Cruel, who reigned from 1350 to 1369, enables us to fix his date approximately, and to guess that he was, like others of his race, a favourite with that maligned ruler. Written in the early days of the new reign, Sem Tob's Proverbios Morales, consisting of 686 seven-syllabled quatrains, are more than a metrical novelty. His collection of sententious maxims, borrowed mainly from Arabic sources and from the Bible, is the first instance in Castilian of the versified epigram which was to produce the brilliant Proverbs of Santillana, who praises the Rabbi as a writer of "very good things," and reports his esteem as a "grand trovador." In Santillana's hands the maxims are Spanish, are European; in Sem Tob's they are Jewish, oriental. The moral is pressed with insistence, the presentation is haphazard; while the extreme concision of thought, the exaggerated frugality of words, tends to obscurity. Against this is to be set the exalted standard of the teaching, the daring figures of the writer, his happiness of epithet, his note of austere melancholy, and his complete triumph in naturalising a new poetic genre.

It has been sought to father on Sem Tob three other pieces: the Treatise of Doctrine, the Revelation of a Hermit, and the Danza de la Muerte. The Treatise, a catechism in octosyllabic triplets with a four-syllabled line, is by Pedro de Berague, and is only curious for its rhythm, imitated from the rime couée, and for being the first work of its kind. Sem Tob was in his grave when the ancient subject of the Argument between Body and Soul was reintroduced by the maker of the Revelation of a Hermit, wherein the souls are figured as birds, gracious or hideous as the case may be. The third line of this didactic poem gives its date as 1382, and this is confirmed by the evidence of the metre and the presence of an Italian savour. In the case of the anonymous Danza de la Muerte the metre once more fixes the period of composition at about the end of the fourteenth century. Most European literatures possess a Danse Macabré of their own; yet, though the Castilian is probably an imitation of some unrecognised French original, it is the oldest known version of the legend. It is not rash to assume that its immediate occasion was the last terrific outbreak of the Black Death, which lasted from 1394 to 1399. Death bids mankind to his revels, and forces them to join his dance. The form is superficially dramatic, and the thirty-three victims—pope, emperor, cardinal, king, and so forth, a cleric and a layman always alternating—reply to the summons in a series of octaves. Whoever composed the Spanish version, he must be accepted as an expert in the art of morbid allegory. Odd to say, the Catalan Carbonell, constructing his Dance of Death in the sixteenth century, rejects this fine Castilian version for the French of Jean de Limoges, Chancellor of Paris.

A writer who represents the stages of the literary evolution of his age is the long-lived Chancellor, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407). His career is a veritable romance of feudalism. Living under Alfonso XI., he became the favourite of Pedro the Cruel, whom he deserted at the psychological moment. He chronicles his own and his father's defection in such terms as Pepys or the Vicar of Bray might use:—"They saw that Don Pedro's affairs were all awry, so they resolved to leave him, not intending to return." Pedro the Cruel, Enrique II., Juan I., Enrique III.—Ayala served all four with profit to his pouch, without flagrant treason. Loyalty he held for a vain thing compared with interest; yet he earned his money and his lands in fight. He ever strove to be on the winning side, but luck was hostile when the Black Prince captured him at Nájera (1367), and when he was taken prisoner at Aljubarrota (1385). The fifteen months spent in an iron cage at the castle of Oviedes after the second defeat gave Ayala one of his opportunities. He had wasted no chance in life, nor did he now. It were pleasant to think with Ticknor that some part of Ayala's Rimado de Palacio "was written during his imprisonment in England,"—pleasant, but difficult. To begin with, it is by no means sure that Ayala ever quitted the Peninsula. More than this: though the Rimado de Palacio was composed at intervals, the stages can be dated approximately. The earlier part of the poem contains an allusion to the schism during the pontificate of Urban VI., so that this passage must date from 1378 or afterwards; the reference to the death of the poet's father, Hernán Pérez de Ayala, brings us to the year 1385 or later; and the statement that the schism had lasted twenty-five years fixes the time of composition as 1403.

Rimado de Palacio (Court Rhymes) is a chance title that has attached itself to Ayala's poem without the author's sanction. It gives a false impression of his theme, which is the decadence of his age. Only within narrow limits does Ayala deal with courts and courtiers; he had a wider outlook, and he scourges society at large. What was a jest to Ruiz was a woe to the Chancellor. Ruiz had a natural sympathy for a loose-living cleric; Ayala lashes this sort with a thong steeped in vitriol. The one looks at life as a farce; the other sees it as a tragedy. Where the first finds matter for merriment, the second burns with the white indignation of the just. The deliberate mordancy of Ayala is impartial insomuch as it is universal. Courtiers, statesmen, bishops, lawyers, merchants—he brands them all with corruption, simony, embezzlement, and exposes them as venal sons of Belial. And, like Ruiz, he places himself in the pillory to heighten his effects. He spares not his superstitious belief in omens, dreams, and such-like fooleries; he discovers himself as a grinder of the poor man's face, a libidinous perjurer, a child of perdition.

But not all Ayala's poem is given up to cursing. In his 705th stanza he closes what he calls his sermón with the confession that he had written it, "being sore afflicted by many grievous sorrows," and in the remaining 904 stanzas Ayala breathes a serener air. In both existing codices—that of Campo-Alange and that of the Escorial—this huge postscript follows the Rimado de Palacio with no apparent break of continuity; yet it differs in form and substance from what precedes. The cuaderna vía alone is used in the satiric and autobiographical verses; the later hymns and songs are metrical experiments—echoes of Galician and Provençal measures, redondillas of seven syllables, attempts to raise the Alexandrine from the dead, results derived from Alfonso's Cantigas and Juan Ruiz' loores. In his seventy-third year Ayala was still working upon his Rimado de Palacio. It was too late for him to master the new methods creeping into vogue, and though in the Cancionero de Baena (No. 518) Ayala answers Sánchez Talavera's challenge in the regulation octaves, he harks back to the cuaderna vía of his youth in his paraphrase of St. Gregory's Job. If he be the writer of the Proverbios en Rimo de Salomón—a doubtful point—his preference for the old system is there undisguised. Could that system have been saved, Ayala had saved it: not even he could stay the world from moving.

His prose is at least as distinguished as his verse. A treatise on falconry, rich in rarities of speech, shows the variety of his interests, and his version of Boccaccio's De Casibus Virorum illustrium brings him into touch with the conquering Italian influence. His reference to Amadís in the Rimado de Palacio (stanza 162), the first mention of that knight-errantry of Spain, proves acquaintance with new models. Translations of Boëtius and of St. Isidore were pastimes; a partial rendering of Livy, done at the King's command, was of greater value. In person or by proxy, Alfonso the Learned had opened up the land of history; Juan Manuel had summarised his uncle's work; the chronicle of the Moor Rasis, otherwise Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn Muhammad ibn Mūsā, had been translated from the Arabic; the annals of Alfonso XI. and his three immediate predecessors were written by some industrious mediocrity perhaps Fernán Sánchez de Tovar, or Juan Núñez de Villaizán. These are not so much absolute history as the raw material of history. In his Chronicles of the Kings of Castile, Ayala considers the reigns of Pedro the Cruel, Enrique II., Juan I., and Enrique III., in a modern scientific spirit. Songs, legends, idle reports, no longer serve as evidence. Ayala sifts his testimonies, compares, counts, weighs them, checks them by personal knowledge. He borrows Livy's framework, inserting speeches which, if not stenographic reports of what was actually said, are complete illustrations of dramatic motive. He deals with events which he had witnessed: plots which his crafty brain inspired, victories wherein he shared, battles in which he bit the dust. The portraits in his gallery are scarce, but every likeness, is a masterpiece rendered with a few broad strokes. He records with cold-blooded impartiality as a judge; his native austerity, his knowledge of affairs and men, guard him from the temptations of the pleader. With his unnatural neutrality go rare instinct for the essential circumstance, unerring sagacity in the divination and presentment of character, unerring art in preparing climax and catastrophe, and the gift of concise, picturesque phrase. A statesman of genius writing personal history with the candour of Pepys: as such the thrifty Mérimée recognised Ayala, and, in his own confection, so revealed him to the nineteenth century.

Footnote:

[4] The contents of this work are summarised in the author's Book of States (chap. xci.).

CHAPTER V
THE AGE OF JUAN II.
1419-1454

Ayala's verse, the conscious effort of deliberate artistry, contrasts with those popular romances which can be divined through the varnish of the sixteenth century. Few, if any, of the existing ballads date from Ayala's time; and of the nineteen hundred printed in Durán's Romancero General the merest handful is older than 1492, when Antonio de Nebrija examined their structure in his Arte de la Lengua Castellana. Yet the older romances were numerous and long-lived enough to supplant the cantares de gesta, against which chronicles and annals made war by giving the same epical themes with more detail and accuracy. In turn these chronicles afforded subjects for romances of a later day. An illustration suffices to prove the point. Every one knows the spirited close of the first in order of Lockhart's Ancient Spanish Ballads:—

"Last night I was the King of Spain—to-day no King am I.

Last night fair castles held my train—to-night where shall I lie?

Last night a hundred pages did serve me on the knee—

To-night not one I call my own: not one pertains to me."

The original is founded on Pedro de Corral's Crónica de Don Rodrigo (chapters 207, 208), which was not written till 1404, and from the same source (chapters 238-244) comes the substance of Lockhart's second ballad:—

"It was when the King Rodrigo had lost his realm of Spain."

The modernity of almost every piece in Lockhart's collection were as easily proved; but it is more important at this point to turn from the popular song-makers to the new school of writers which was forming itself upon foreign models.

Representative of these innovations is the grandson of Enrique II., Enrique de Villena (1384-1434), upon whom posterity has conferred a marquisate which he never possessed in life.[5] His first production is said to have been a set of coplas written, as Master of the Order of Calatrava, for the royal feasts at Zaragoza in 1414; his earliest known work is his Arte de trovar (Art of Poetry), given in the same year at the Consistory of the Gay Science at Barcelona. Villena, of whose treatise mere scraps survive, shows minute acquaintance with the works of early trovadores; of general principles he says naught, losing himself in discursive details. Early in 1417 followed the Trabajos de Hércules (Labours of Hercules), first written in Catalan by request of Pero Pardo, and done into Castilian in the autumn of the year. This tedious allegory, crushed beneath a weight of pedantry, is unredeemed by ingenuity or fancy, and the style is disfigured by violent and absurd inversions which bespeak long, tactless study of Latin texts. Juan Manuel's dignified restraint is lost on his successor, itching to flaunt inopportune learning with references to Aristotle, Aulus Gellius, and St. Jerome. In 1423, at the instance of Sancho de Jaraba, Villena wrote his twenty chapters on carving—the Arte cisoria, an epicure's handbook to the royal table, compact of curious counsels and recipes expounded with horrid eloquence by a pedant who tended to gluttony. Still odder is the Libro de Aojamiento (Dissertation on the Evil Eye) with its three "preventive modes," as recommended by Avicenna and his brethren. Translations of Dante and Cicero are lost, and three treatises on leprosy, on consolation, and on the Eighth Psalm are valueless. Villena piqued himself on being the first in Spain—he might perhaps have said the first anywhere—to translate the whole Æneid; but he marches to ruin with his mimicry of Latin idioms, his abuse of inversion, and his graces of a cart-horse in the lists. No contemporary was more famed for universal accomplishment; so that, while he lived, men held him for a wizard, and, when he died, applauded the partial burning of his books by Lope de Barrientos, afterwards Bishop of Segovia, who put the rest to his private uses. Santillana and Juan de Mena assert that Villena wrote Castilian verse, and Baena implies as much; if so, he was probably a common poetaster, the loss of whose rhymes is a stroke of luck. A Castilian poem on the labours of Hercules, ascribed to him by Pellicer, is a rank forgery. Measured by his repute, Villena's works are disappointing. But if we reflect that he translated Dante, that he strove to naturalise successful foreign methods, and that in his absurdest moments he proves his susceptibility to new ideas, we may explain his renown and his influence. Nor did these end with his life; for Lope de Vega, Alarcón, Rojas Zorrilla, and Hartzenbusch have brought him on the boards, and he has appealed with singular force to the imaginations of both Quevedo and Larra.

To Villena's time belong two specimens of the old encyclopædic school: the Libro de los Gatos, translated from the Narrationes of the English monk, Odo of Cheriton; and the Libro de los Enxemplos of Clemente Sánchez of Valderas, whose seventy-one missing stories were brought to light in 1878 by M. Morel-Fatio. Sánchez' collection, thus completed, shows the entrance into Spain of the legend of Buddha's life, adapted by some Christian monk from the Sanskrit Lalita-Vistara, and popular the world over as the Romance of Barlaam and Josaphat. The style is carefully modelled on Juan Manuel's manner.

The Cancionero de Baena, named after the anthologist Juan Alfonso de Baena above mentioned, contains the verses of some sixty poets who flourished during the reign of Juan II., or a little earlier. This collection, first published in 1851, mirrors two conflicting tendencies. The old Galician school is represented by Alfonso Álvarez de Villasandino (sometimes called de Illescas), a copious, foul-mouthed ruffian, with gusts of inspiration and an abiding mastery of technique. To the same section belong the Archdeacon of Toro, a facile versifier, and Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara, whose name is inseparable from that of Macías, El Enamorado. Macías has left five songs of slight distinction, and, as a poet, ranks below Rodríguez de la Cámara. Yet he lives on the capital of his legend, the type of the lover faithful unto death, and the circumstances of his passing are a part of Castilian literature. The tale is (but there are variants), that Macías, once a member of Villena's household, was imprisoned at Arjonilla, where a jealous husband slew the poet in the act of singing his platonic love. Quoted times innumerable, this more or less authentic story of Macías' end ensured him an immortality far beyond the worth of his verses: it fired the popular imagination, and enters into literature in Lope de Vega's Porfiar hasta morir and in Larra's El Doncel de Don Enrique el Doliente.

A like romantic memory attaches to Macías' friend, Juan Rodríguez de la Cámara (also called Rodríguez del Padrón), the last poet of the Galician school, represented in Baena's Cancionero by a single cántica. The conjectures that make Rodríguez the lover of Juan II.'s wife, Isabel, or of Enrique IV.'s wife, Juana, are destroyed by chronology. None the less it is certain that the writer was concerned in some mysterious, dangerous love-affair which led to his exile, and, as some believe, to his profession as a Franciscan monk. His seventeen surviving songs are all erotic, with the exception of the Flama del divino Rayo, his best performance in thanksgiving for his spiritual conversion. His loves are also recounted in three prose books, of which the semi-chivalresque novel, El Siervo libre de Amor, is still readable. But Rodríguez interests most as the last representative of the Galician verse tradition.

Save Ayala, who is exampled by one solitary poem, the oldest singer in Baena's choir is Pero Ferrús, the connecting link between the Galician and Italian schools. A learned rather than an inspired poet, Ferrús is remembered chiefly because of his chance allusion to Amadís in the stanzas dedicated to Ayala. Four poets in Baena's song-book herald the invasion of Spain by the Italians, and it is fitting that the first and best of these should be a man of Italian blood, Francisco Imperial, the son of a Genoese jeweller, settled in Seville. Imperial, as his earliest poem shows, read Arabic and English. He may have met with Gower's Confessio Amantis before it was done into Castilian by Juan de la Cuenca at the beginning of the fifteenth century—being the first translation of an English book in Spain. Howbeit, he quotes English phrases, and offers a copy of French verses. These are trifles: Imperial's best gift to his adopted country was his transplanting of Dante, whom he imitates assiduously, reproducing the Florentine note with such happy intonation as to gain for him the style of poet—as distinguished from trovador—from Santillana, who awards him "the laurel of this western land." Thirteen poems by Ruy Paez de Ribera, vibrating with the melancholy of illness, shuddering with the squalor of want, affiliate their writer with Imperial's new expression, and vaguely suggest the realising touch of Villon. At least one piece by Ferrant Sánchez Talavera is memorable—the elegy on the death of the Admiral Ruy Díaz de Mendoza, which anticipates the mournful march, the solemn music, some of the very phrases of Jorge Manrique's noble coplas. In the Dantesque manner is Gonzalo Martínez de Medina's flagellation of the corruptions of his age. Baena, secretary to Juan II., in eighty numbers approves himself a weak imitator of Villasandino's insolence, and is remembered simply as the arranger of a handbook which testifies to the definitive triumph of the compiler's enemies.

A poet of greater performance than any in the Cancionero de Baena is the shifty politician, Íñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458), townsman of Rabbi Sem Tob, the Jew of Carrión. Oddly enough, Baena excludes Santillana from his collection, and Santillana, in reviewing the poets of his time, ignores Baena, whom he probably despised as a parasite. A remarkable letter to the Constable of Portugal shows Santillana as a pleasant prose-writer; in his rhetorical Lamentaçion en Propheçia de la segunda Destruyçion de España he fails in the grand style, though he succeeds in the familiar with his collection of old wives' fireside proverbs, Refranes que diçen las Viejas tras el Huego. His Centiloquio, a hundred rhymed proverbs divided into fourteen chapters, is gracefully written and skilfully put together; his Comedieta de Ponza is reminiscent of both Dante and Boccaccio, and its title, together with the fact that the dialogue is allotted to different personages, has led many into the error of taking it for a dramatic piece. Far more essentially dramatic in spirit is the Diálogo de Bias contra Fortuna, which embodies a doctrinal argument upon the advantages of the philosophic mind in circumstances of adversity; and grouped with this goes the Doctrinal de Privados, a fierce philippic against Álvaro de Luna, Santillana's political foe, who is convicted of iniquities out of his own mouth.

It is impossible to say of Santillana that he was an original genius: it is within bounds to class him as a highly gifted versifier with extraordinary imitative powers. He has no "message" to deliver, no wide range of ideas: his attraction lies not so much in what is said as in his trick of saying it. He is one of the few poets whom erudition has not hampered. He was familiar with writers as diverse as Dante and Petrarch and Alain Chartier, and he reproduces their characteristics with a fine exactness and felicity. But he was something more than an intelligent echo, for he filed and laboured till he acquired a final manner of his own. Doubtless to his own taste his forty-two sonnets—fechos al itálico modo, as he proudly tells you were his best titles to glory; and it is true that he acclimatised the sonnet in Spain, sharing with the Aragonese, Juan de Villapando, the honour of being Spain's only sonneteer before Boscán's time. Commonplace in thought, stiff in expression, the sonnets are only historically curious. It is in his lighter vein that Santillana reaches his full stature. The grace and gaiety of his decires, serranillas and vaqueiras are all his own. If he borrowed suggestions from Provençal poets, he is free of the Provençal artifice, and sings with the simplicity of Venus' doves. Here he revealed a peculiar aspect of his many-sided temperament, and by his tact made a living thing of primitive emotions, which were to be done to death in the pastorals of heavy-handed bunglers. The first-fruits of the pastoral harvest live in the house where Santillana garnered them, and those roses, amid which he found the milkmaid of La Finojosa, are still as sweet in his best known—and perhaps his best—ballad as on that spring morning, between Calateveño and Santa María, some four hundred years since. Ceasing to be an imitator, Santillana proves inimitable.

The official court-poet of the age was Juan de Mena (1411-56), known to his own generation as the "prince of Castilian poets," and Cervantes, writing more than a hundred and fifty years afterwards, dubs him "that great Córdoban poet." A true son of Córdoba, Mena has all the qualities of the Córdoban school—the ostentatious embellishment of his ancestor, Lucan, and the unintelligible preciosity of his descendant, Góngora. The Italian travels of his youth undid him, and set him on the hopeless line of Italianising Spanish prose. A false attribution enters the Annals of Juan II. under Mena's name: the mere fact that Juan II.'s Crónica is a model of correct prose disposes of the pretension. Mena's summary of the Iliad, and the commentary to his poem the Coronación, convict him of being the worst prose-writer in all Castilian literature. Simplicity and vulgarity were for him synonyms, and he carries his doctrine to its logical extreme by adopting impossible constructions, by wrenching his sentences asunder by exaggerated inversions, and by adding absurd Latinisms to his vocabulary. These defects are less grave in his verse, but even there they follow him. Argote de Molina would have him the author of the political satire called the Coplas de la Panadera; but Mena lacked the lightness of touch, the wit and sparkle of the imaginary baker's wife. If he be read at all, he is to be studied in his Laberinto, also known as the Trescientas, a heavy allegory whose deliberate obscurity is indicated by its name. The alternative title, Trescientas; is explained by the fact that the poem consisted of three hundred stanzas, to which sixty-five were added by request of the King, who kept the book by him of nights and hankered for a stanza daily, using it, maybe, as a soporific. The poet is whisked by the dragons in Bellona's chariot to Fortune's palace, and there begins the inevitable imitation of Dante, with its machinery of seven planetary circles, and its grandiose vision of past, present, and future. The work of a learned poet taking himself too seriously and straining after effects beyond his reach, the Laberinto is tedious as a whole; yet, though Mena's imagination fails to realise his abstractions, though he be riddled with purposeless conceits, he touches a high level in isolated episodes. Much of his vogue may be accounted for by the abundance with which he throws off striking lines of somewhat hard, even marmoreal beauty, and by the ardent patriotism which inspires him in his best passages. A poet by flashes, at intervals rare and far apart, Mena does himself injustice by too close a devotion to æsthetic principles, that made failure a certainty. Careful, conscientious, aspiring, he had done far more if he had attempted much less.

Meanwhile Castilian prose goes forward on Alfonso's lines. The anonymous Crónica of Juan II., wrongly ascribed to Mena and Pérez de Guzmán, but more probably due to Álvar García de Santa María and others unknown, is a classic example of style and accuracy, rare in official historiography. Mingled with many chivalresque details concerning the hidalgos of the court is the central episode of the book, the execution of the Constable, Álvaro de Luna. The last great scene is skilfully prepared and is recounted with artful simplicity in a celebrated passage:—"He set to undoing his doublet-collar, making ready his long garments of blue camlet, lined with fox-skins; and, the master being stretched upon the scaffold, the executioner came to him, begged his pardon, embraced him, ran the poniard through his neck, cut off his head, and hung it on a hook; and the head stayed there nine days, the body three." Passionate declamation of a still higher order is found in the Crónica de Don Álvaro de Luna, written by a most dexterous advocate, who puts his mastery of phrase, his graphic presentation and dramatic vigour, to the service of partisanship. Perhaps no man was ever quite so great and good as Álvaro de Luna appears in his Crónica, but the strength of conviction in the narrator is expressed in terms of moving eloquence that would persuade to accept the portrait, not merely as a masterpiece—for that it is—but, as an authentic presentment of a misunderstood hero.

After much violent controversy, it may now be taken as settled that the Crónica del Cid is based upon Alfonso's Estoria de Espanna. But it comes not direct, being borrowed from Alfonso XI.'s Crónica de Castilla, a transcript of the Estoria. The differences from the early text may be classed under three heads: corruptions of the early text, freer and exacter quotations from the romances, and deliberate alterations made with an eye to greater conformity with popular legends. Valuable as containing the earliest versions of many traditions which were to be diffused through the Romanceros, the Crónica del Cid is of small historic authority, and Alfonso's stately prose loses greatly in the carrying.

Ayala's nephew, Fernán Pérez de Guzmán (1378-1460), continues his uncle's poetic tradition in the forms borrowed from Italy, as well as in earlier lyrics of the Galician school; but his mediocre performances as a poet are overshadowed by his brilliant exploit as a historian. He is responsible for the Mar de Historias (The Sea of Histories), which consists of three divisions. The first deals with emperors and kings ranging from Alexander to King Arthur, from Charlemagne to Godfrey de Bouillon; the second treats of saints and sages, their lives and the books they wrote; and both are arrangements of some French version of Guido delle Colonne's Mare Historiarum. The third part, now known as the Generaciones y Semblanzas (Generations and Likenesses), is Pérez de Guzmán's own workmanship. Foreign critics have compared him to Plutarch and to St. Simon; and, though the parallel seems dangerous, it can be maintained. This amounts to saying that Pérez de Guzmán is one of the greatest portrait-painters in the world; and that precisely he is. He argues from the seen to the unseen with a curious anticipation of modern psychological methods; and it forms an integral part of his plan to draw his personages with the audacity of truth. He does his share, and there they stand, living as our present-day acquaintances, and better known. Take a few figures at random from his gallery: Enrique de Villena, fat, short, and fair, a libidinous glutton, ever in the clouds, a dolt in practice, subtle of genius so that he came by all pure knowledge easily; Núñez de Guzmán, dissolute, of giant strength, curt of speech, a jovial roysterer; the King Enrique, grave-visaged, bitter-tongued, lonely, melancholy; Catherine of Lancaster, tall, fair, ruddy, wine-bibbing, ending in paralysis; the Constable López Dávalos, a self-made man, handsome, taking, gay, amiable, strong, a fighter, clever, prudent, but—as man must have some fault—cunning and given to astrology. With such portraits Pérez de Guzmán abounds. The picture costs him no effort: the man is seized in the act and delivered to you, with no waste of words, with no essential lacking, classified as a museum specimen, impartially but with a tendency to severity; and when Pérez de Guzmán has spoken, there is no more to say. He is a good hater, and lets you see it when he deals with courtiers, whom he regards with the true St. Simonian loathing for an upstart. But history has confirmed the substantial justice of his verdicts, and has thus shown that the artist in him was even stronger than the malignant partisan. It is saying much. And to his endowment of observation, intelligence, knowledge, and character, Pérez de Guzmán joins the perfect practice of that clear, energetic Castilian speech which his forebears bequeathed him.

An interesting personal narrative hides beneath the mask of the Vida y Hazañas del gran Tamarlán (Life and Deeds of the Mighty Timour). First published in 1582, this work is nothing less than a report of the journey (1403-6) of Ruy González de Clavijo (d. 1412), who traversed all the space "from silken Samarcand to cedar'd Lebanon," and more. Clavijo tells of his wanderings with a quaint mingling of credulity and scepticism; still, his witness is at least as trustworthy as Marco Polo's, and his recital is vastly more graphic than the Venetian's. A very similar motive informs the Crónica del Conde de Buelna, Don Pero Niño (1375-1446), by Pero Niño's friend and pennon-bearer, Gutierre Díaz Gámez. An alternative title—the Victorial—discloses the author's intention of representing his leader as the hero of countless triumphs by sea and land. A well-read esquire, Díaz Gámez quotes from the Libro de Alexandre, flecks his pages with allusions, and—with a true traveller's lust for local colouring—comes pat with technical French terms: his sanglieres, mestrieres, cursieres, destrieres. These affectations apart, Díaz Gámez writes with sense and force; exalting his chief overmuch, but giving bright glimpses of a mad, adventurous life, and rising to altisonant eloquence in chivalresque outbursts, one of which Cervantes has borrowed, and not bettered, in Don Quixote's great discourse on letters and arms.

Knight-errantry was, indeed, beginning to possess the land, and, as it chances, an account of the maddest, hugest tourney in the world's history is written for us by an eye-witness, Pero Rodríguez de Lena, in the Libro del Paso Honroso (Book of the Passage of Honour). Lena tells how the demon of chivalry entered into Suero de Quiñones, who, seeking release from his pledge of wearing in his lady's honour an iron chain each Thursday, could hit on no better means than by offering, with nine knightly brethren, to hold the bridge of San Marcos at Órbigo against the paladins of Europe. The tilt lasted from July 10 to August 9, 1434, and is described with simple directness by Lena, who looks upon the six hundred single combats as the most natural thing in the world: but his story is important as a "human document," and as testimony that the extravagant incidents of the chivalrous romances had their counterparts in real life.

The fifteenth century finds the chivalrous romance established in Spain: how it arrived there must be left for discussion till we come to deal with the best example of the kind—Amadís de Gaula. Here and now it suffices to say that there probably existed an early Spanish version of this story which has disappeared; and to note that the dividing line between the annals, filled with impossible traditions, and the chivalrous tales, is of the finest: so fine, in fact, that several of the latter—for example, Florisel de Niquea and Amadís de Grecia—take on historical airs and call themselves crónicas. The mention of the lost Castilian Amadís is imperative at this point if we are to recognise one of the chief contemporary influences. For the moment, we must be content to note its practical manifestations in the extravagances of Suero de Quiñones, and of other knights whose names are given in the chronicles of Álvaro de Luna and Juan II. The spasmodic outbursts of the craze observable in the serious chapters of Díaz Gámez are but the distant rumblings before the hurricane.

While Amadís de Gaula was read in courts and palaces, three contemporary writers worked in different veins. Alfonso Martínez de Toledo (1398-?1466), Archpriest of Talavera, and chaplain to Juan II., is the author of the Reprobación del Amor mundano, otherwise El Corbacho (The Scourge). The latter title, not of the author's choosing, has led some to say that he borrowed from Boccaccio. The resemblance between the Reprobación and the Italian Corbaccio is purely superficial. Martínez goes forth to rebuke the vices of both sexes in his age; but the moral purpose is dropped, and he settles down to a deliberate invective against women and their ways. Amador de los Ríos suggests that Martínez stole hints from Francisco Eximenis' Carro de la donas, a Catalan version of Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus: as the latter is a panegyric on the sex, the suggestion is unacceptable. The plain fact stares us in the face that Martínez' immediate model is the Archpriest of Hita, and in his fourth chapter that jovial clerk is cited. Indiscriminate, unjust, and even brutal, as Martínez often is, his slashing satire may be read with extraordinary pleasure: that is, when we can read him at all, for his editions are rare and his vocabulary puzzling. He falls short of Ruiz' wicked urbanity; but he matches him in keenness of malicious wit, in malignant parody, in picaresque intention, while he surpasses him as a collector of verbal quips and popular proverbs. The wealth of his splenetic genius (it is nothing less) affords at least one passage to the writer of the Celestina. Last of all—and this is an exceeding virtue—Martínez' speech maintains a fine standard of purity at a time when foreign corruptions ran riot. Hence he deserves high rank among the models of Castilian prose.

Another chaplain of Juan II., Juan de Lucena (fl. 1453), is the author of the Vita Beata, lacking in originality, but notable for excellence of absolute style. He follows Cicero's plan in the De finibus bonorum et malorum, introducing Santillana, Mena, and García de Santa María (the probable author, as we have seen, of the King's Crónica). In an imaginary conversation these great personages discuss the question of mortal happiness, arriving at the pessimist conclusion that it does not exist, or—sorry alternative—that it is unattainable. Lucena adds nothing to the fund of ideas upon this hackneyed theme, but the perfect finish of his manner lends attraction to his lucid commonplaces.

The last considerable writer of the time is the Bachelor Alfonso de la Torre (fl. 1461), who returns upon the didactic manner in his Visión deleitable de la Filosofía y Artes liberales. Nominally, the Bachelor offers a philosophic, allegorical novel; in substance, his work is a mediæval encyclopædia. It was assuredly never designed for entertainment, but it must still be read by all who are curious to catch those elaborate harmonies and more delicate refinements of fifteenth-century Castilian prose which half tempt to indulgence for the writer's insufferable priggishness. Alfonso de la Torre figures by right in the anthologies, and his elegant extracts win an admiration of which his unhappy choice of subject would otherwise deprive him.

Footnote:

[5] Strictly speaking, this writer should be called Enrique de Aragón; but, since this leads to confusion with his contemporary, the Infante Enrique de Aragón, it is convenient to distinguish him as Enrique de Villena. He was not a marquis, and never uses the title.

CHAPTER VI
THE AGE OF ENRIQUE IV. AND THE CATHOLIC KINGS
1454-1516

The literary movement of Juan II.'s reign is overlapped and continued outside Spain by poets in the train of Alfonso V. of Aragón, who, conquering Naples in 1443, became the patron of scholars like George of Trebizond and Æneas Sylvius. It is notable that, despite their new Italian environment, Alfonso's singers write by preference in Castilian rather than in their native Catalan. Their work is to be sought in the Cancionero General, in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa, and especially in the Cancionero de Stúñiga, which derives its name from the accident that the first two poems in the collection are by Lope de Stúñiga, cousin of that Suero de Quiñones who held the Paso Honroso, mentioned under Lena's name in the previous chapter. Stúñiga prolongs the courtly tradition in verses whose extreme finish is remarkable. Juan de Tapia, Juan de Andújar, and Fernando de la Torre practise in the same school of knightly hedonism; and at the opposite pole is Juan de Valladolid, son of the public executioner, a vagabond minstrel, who passed his life in coarse polemics with Antón de Montero, with Gómez Manrique, and with Manrique's brother, the Conde de Paredes. A notorious name is that of Pero Torrellas, whose Coplas de las calidades de las donas won their author repute as a satirist of women, and begot innumerable replies and counterpleas: the satire, to tell the truth, is poor enough, and is little more than violent but pointless invective. The best as well as the most copious poet of the Neapolitan group is Carvajal (or Carvajales), who bequeaths us the earliest known romance, and so far succumbs to circumstances as to produce occasional verses in Italian. In Castilian, Carvajal has the true lyrical cry, and is further distinguished by a virile, martial note, in admirable contrast with the insipid courtesies of his brethren.

To return to Spain, where, in accordance with the maxim that one considerable poet begets many poetasters, countless rhymesters spring from Mena's loins. The briefest mention must suffice for the too-celebrated Coplas del Provincial, which, to judge by the extracts printed from its hundred and forty-nine stanzas, is a prurient lampoon against private persons. It lacks neither vigour nor wit, and denotes a mastery of mordant phrase: but the general effect of its obscene malignity is to make one sympathise with the repeated attempts at its suppression. The attribution to Rodrigo Cota of this perverse performance is capricious: internal evidence goes to show that the libel is the work of several hands.

A companion piece of far greater merit is found in thirty-two octosyllabic stanzas entitled Coplas de Mingo Revulgo. Like the Coplas del Provincial, this satirical eclogue has been referred to Rodrigo Cota, and, like many other anonymous works, it has been ascribed to Mena. Neither conjecture is supported by evidence, and Sarmiento's ascription of Mingo Revulgo to Hernando del Pulgar, who wrote an elaborate commentary on it, rests on the puerile assumption that "none but the poet could have commented himself with such clearness." Two shepherds—Mingo Revulgo and Gil Aribato—represent the lower and upper class respectively, discussing the abuses of society. Gil Aribato blames the people, whose vices are responsible for corruption in high places; Mingo Revulgo contends that the dissolute King should bear the blame for the ruin of the state, and the argument ends by lauding the golden mean of the burgess. The tone of Mingo Revulgo is more moderate than that of the Provincial; the attacks on current evils are more general, more discreet, and therefore more deadly; and the aim of the later satire is infinitely more serious and elevated. Cast in dramatic form, but devoid of dramatic action, Mingo Revulgo leads directly to the eclogues of Juan del Encina, so often called the father of the Spanish theatre; but its immediate interest lies in the fact that it is the first of effective popular satires.

Among the poets of this age, the Jewish convert, Antón de Montoro, el Ropero (1404-?1480), holds a place apart. A fellow of parts, Montoro combined verse-making with tailoring, and his trade is frequently thrown in his teeth by rivals smarting under his bitter insolence. Save when he pleads manfully for his kinsfolk, who are persecuted and slaughtered by a bloodthirsty mob, Montoro's serious efforts are mostly failures. His picaresque verses, especially those addressed to Juan de Valladolid, are replenished with a truculent gaiety which amuses us almost as much as it amused Santillana; but he should be read in extracts rather than at length. He is suspected of complicity in the Coplas del Provincial, and there is good ground for thinking that to him belong the two most scandalous pieces in the Cancionero de burlas provocantes á risa—namely, the Pleito del Manto (Suit of the Coverlet), and a certain unmentionable comedy which purports to be by Fray Montesino, and travesties Mena's Trescientas in terms of extreme filthiness. Montoro's short pieces are reminiscent of Juan Ruiz, and, for all his indecency, it is fair to credit him with much cleverness and with uncommon technical skill. His native vulgarity betrays him into excesses of ribaldry which mar the proper exercise of his undeniable gifts.

A better man and a better writer is Juan Álvarez Gato (?1433-96), the Madrid knight of whom Gómez Manrique says that he "spoke pearls and silver." It is difficult for us to judge him on his merits, for, though his cancionero exists, it has not yet been printed; and we are forced to study him as he is represented in the Cancionero General, where his love-songs show a dignity of sentiment and an exquisiteness of expression not frequent in any epoch, and exceptional in his own time. His sacred lyrics, the work of his old age, lack unction: but even here his mastery of form saves his pious villancicos from oblivion, and ranks him as the best of Encina's predecessors. His friend, Hernán Mexía, follows Pero Torrellas with a satire on the foibles of women, in which he easily outdoes his model in mischievous wit and in ingenious fancy.

Gómez Manrique, Señor de Villazopeque (1412-91), is a poet of real distinction, whose entire works have been reprinted from two complementary cancioneros discovered in 1885. Sprung from a family illustrious in Spanish history, Gómez Manrique was a foremost leader in the rebellion of the Castilian nobles against Enrique IV. In allegorical pieces like the Batalla de amores, he frankly imitates the Galician model, and in one instance he replies to a certain Don Álvaro in Portuguese. Then he joins himself to the rising Italian school, wherein his uncle, Santillana, had preceded him; and his experiments extend to adaptations of Sem Tob's sententious moralisings, to didactic poems in the manner of Mena, and to coplas on Juan de Valladolid, in which he measures himself unsuccessfully with the rude tailor, Montoro. Humour was not Gómez Manrique's calling, and his attention to form is an obvious preoccupation which diminishes his vigour: but his chivalrous refinement and noble tenderness are manifest in his answer to Torrellas' invective. His pathos is nowhere more touching than in the elegiacs on Garcilaso de la Vega; while in the lines to his wife, Juana de Mendoza, Gómez Manrique portrays the fleetingness of life, the sting of death, with almost incomparable beauty.

His Representación del Nacimiento de Nuestro Señor, the earliest successor to the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, is a liturgical drama written for and played at the convent of Calabazanos, of which his sister was Superior. It consists of twenty octosyllabic stanzas delivered by the Virgin, St. Joseph, St. Gabriel, St. Michael, St. Raphael, an angel, and three shepherds, the whole closing with a cradle-song. Simple as the construction is, it is more elaborate than that of a later play on the Passion, wherein the Virgin, St. John, and the Magdalen appear (though the last takes no part in the dialogue). The refrain or estribillo at the end of each stanza goes to show that this piece was intended to be sung. These primitive essays in the hieratic drama have all the interest of what was virtually a new invention, and their historical importance is only exceeded by that of a secular play, written by Gómez Manrique for the birthday of Alfonso, brother of Enrique IV., in which the Infanta Isabel played one of the Muses. In all three experiments the action is of the slightest, though the dialogue is as dramatic as can be expected from a first attempt. The point to be noted is that Gómez Manrique foreshadows both the lay and sacred elements of the Spanish theatre.

His fame has been unjustly eclipsed by that of his nephew, Jorge Manrique, Señor de Belmontejo (1440-1478), a brilliant soldier and partisan of Queen Isabel's, who perished in an encounter before the gates of Garci-Múñoz, and is renowned by reason of a single masterpiece. His verses are mostly to be found in the Cancionero General, and a few are given in the cancioneros of Seville and Toledo. Like that of his uncle, Gómez, his vein of humour is thin and poor, and the satiric stanzas to his stepmother border on vulgarity. In acrostic love-songs and in other compositions of a like character, Jorge Manrique is merely clever in the artificial style of many contemporaries—is merely a careful craftsman absorbed in the technical details of art, with small merit beyond that of formal dexterity. The forty-three stanzas entitled the Coplas de Jorge Manrique por la muerte de su padre, have brought their writer an immortality which, outliving all freaks of taste, seems as secure as Cervantes' own. An attempt has been made to prove that Jorge Manrique's elegiacs on his father are not original, and that the elegist had some knowledge of Abu 'l-Bakā Salih ar-Rundi's poem on the decadence of the Moslem power in Spain. Undoubtedly Valera has so ingeniously rendered the Arab poet as to make the resemblance seem pronounced: but the theory is untenable, for it is not pretended that Jorge Manrique could read Arabic, and lofty commonplaces on death abound in all literature, from the Bible downwards.

In this unique composition Jorge Manrique approves himself, for once, a poet of absolute genius, an exquisite in lyrical orchestration. The poem opens with a slow movement, a solemn lament on the vanity of grandeur, the frailty of life; it modulates into resigned acceptance of an inscrutable decree; it closes with a superb symphony, through which are heard the voices of the seraphim and the angelic harps of Paradise. The workmanship is of almost incomparable excellence, and in scarcely one stanza can the severest criticism find a technical flaw. Jorge Manrique's sincerity touched a chord which vibrates in the universal heart, and his poem attained a popularity as immediate as it was imperishable. Camões sought to imitate it; writers like Montemôr and Silvestre glossed it; Lope de Vega declared that it should be written in letters of gold; it was done into Latin and set to music in the sixteenth century by Venegas de Henestrosa; and in our century it has been admirably translated by Longfellow in a version from which these stanzas are taken:—

"Behold of what delusive worth

The bubbles we pursue on earth,

The shapes we chase

Amid a world of treachery;

They vanish ere death shuts the eye,

And leave no trace.

Time steals them from us,—chances strange,

Disastrous accidents, and change,

That come to all;

Even in the most exalted state,