The Project Gutenberg eBook, Chapters on Spanish Literature, by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

CHAPTERS ON
SPANISH LITERATURE

CHAPTERS ON
SPANISH LITERATURE

BY
JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY
FELLOW OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE SPANISH ACADEMY
MEDALLIST OF THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA, ETC.
LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE
AND COMPANY LTD.
1908

TO
MY FELLOW-MEMBERS
OF
THE HISPANIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA
THESE LECTURES
ARE CORDIALLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

Last summer the Trustees of the Hispanic Society of America did me the honour to invite me to give a course of lectures on Spanish literature in the United States, and almost at the same time an invitation to lecture on the same subject reached me from the Provost of University College, London. The chapters contained in the present volume are the result. The lectures on the Cid, Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Calderón, and Modern Spanish Novelists were delivered during the autumn and winter of 1907 at the University of Columbia; some of these were repeated at Cornell, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, and Yale Universities; some at Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, and Smith’s College (Northampton, Massachusetts); and the whole series was given this spring at University College, London.

Owing to the limited amount of time available for each lecture, it became necessary to omit a few paragraphs here and there in delivery. These are now restored. With the exception of the chapter on the Archpriest of Hita (part of which has been recast), all the lectures are printed substantially as they were written. Occasional references have been added in the form of notes.

In addresses of this kind some repetition of ‘you’ and ‘I’ is almost unavoidable. It has, however, been thought better to retain the conversational character of the lectures, and it is hoped that the use of the objectionable first personal pronoun does not degenerate into abuse.

Lastly, it is a duty and pleasure to thank my friendly audiences in America and England for the indulgence with which they listened to these discourses.

JAMES FITZMAURICE-KELLY.

Kneippbaden: vid Norrköping,
xxxxxxxxxMay 1, 1908.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
THE CID

Just as a portrait discloses the artist’s opinion of his sitter, so the choice of a hero is an involuntary piece of self-revelation. As man fashions his idols in his own image, we are in a fair way to understand him, if we know what he admires: and, as it is with individual units, so is it with races. National heroes symbolise the ambitions, the foibles, the general temper and radical qualities of those who have set them up as exemplars. But there are two sides to every character, and Spain has two national heroes known all the world over: the practical Cid and the idealistic Don Quixote, one of them an historical figure, and the other the child of a great man’s fancy. Perhaps to the majority of mankind the offspring of Cervantes’s poetic imagination is more vividly present than the authentic warrior who headed many a desperate charge. It is the singular privilege of genius to substitute its own intense conceptions for the unromantic facts, and to create out of nothing beings that seem more vital than men of flesh and blood. Don Quixote has become a part of the visible universe, while most of us behold the Cid, not as he really was, but as Corneille portrayed him more than five centuries after his death. It may not be amiss to bring him back to earth by recalling the ascertainable incidents in his adventurous career.

So marked are the differences between the Cid of history and the Cid of legend that, early in the nineteenth century his very existence was called in question by the sceptical Jesuit Masdeu, an historian who delighted in paradox. Masdeu’s doubts were reiterated by Samuel Dunham in his History of Spain and Portugal, and by Dunham’s translator, Antonio María de Alcalá Galiano, a writer of repute in his own day. Alcalá Galiano’s incredulity caused him some personal inconvenience, for—as his kinsman, the celebrated novelist Juan Valera, records—he was threatened with an action at law by a Spanish gentleman who piqued himself on his descent from the Cid, and was not disposed to see his alleged ancestor put aside as a fabulous creature like the Phœnix. These negations, more or less sophistical, are the follies of the learned, and they have their match in the assertions of another school that sought to reconcile divergent views by assuming the existence of two Cids, each with a wife called Jimena, and each with a war-horse called Babieca. This generous process of duplicating everybody and everything has not found favour. Cervantes expresses his view through the canon in Don Quixote:—‘That there was a Cid, as well as a Bernardo del Carpio, is beyond doubt; but that they did the deeds which they are said to have done, I take to be very doubtful.’ Few of us would care to be so affirmative as the canon with respect to Bernardo del Carpio, but he is perfectly right as regards the Cid.

It is certain that the Cid existed in the flesh. He was the son of Diego Lainez, a soldier who fought in the Navarrese campaign. Pérez de Guzmán, in the Loores de los claros varones de España, says that the Cid was born at Río de Ovierna:—

Este varón tan notable

en Río de Ovierna[1] nasció.

[3]But the usual version is that the Cid was born at Bivar near Burgos, about the year 1040, and thence took his territorial designation. To contemporaries he was first of all known simply as Rodrigo (or Ruy) Díaz de Bivar—Roderick, son of James, of Bivar; and later, from his prowess in single combat, as the Campeador (the Champion or Challenger). What was probably his earliest feat of this kind, the overthrow of a Navarrese knight, is recorded in a copy of rudely rhymed Latin verses, apparently the most ancient of the poems which were to commemorate the Cid’s exploits:—

Eia! laetando, populi catervae,

Campi-doctoris hoc carmen audite!

Magis qui eius freti estis ope,

Cuncti venite!

Nobiliori de genere ortus,

Quod in Castella non est illo maius:

Hispalis novit et Iberum litus

Quis Rodericus.

Hoc fuit primum singulare bellum,

Cum adolescens devicit Navarrum:

Hinc Campi-doctor dictus est maiorum

Ore virorum.

The epithet gained at this early period clung to him through life: it is applied to him even by his enemies. It is curious to find that the Arab chroniclers constantly speak of him as Al-kambeyator, but never as the Cid—a word which is usually said to derive from the Arabic Sidi (= My Lord). This circumstance makes it doubtful whether he was widely known as the Cid during his own lifetime. There is, indeed, a pleasing legend to the effect that the King of Castile, on hearing Ruy Díaz de Bivar addressed as Sidi by Arab prisoners of war, decreed that the successful soldier should henceforth be known by that name. But there is no evidence to support this story, and it is rather too picturesque to be plausible. It seems more likely that Ruy Díaz de Bivar was first addressed as Sidi by Arabs who served under him or by the Arab population of Valencia which he conquered towards the end of his career, that the phrase was taken up by his Christian troops, and that it was not generally current among Spaniards till after his death. That he soon afterwards became widely known as ‘the Cid’ or ‘my Cid’ is apparent from a line in the rhymed Latin chronicle of the siege of Almería, written some fifty years later:—

Ipse Rodericus, mio Cid semper vocatus.

But we need not discuss these minutiæ further. Let us record the fact that Ruy Díaz de Bivar is known as the Cid Campeador, and pass on to his historical achievements. At the age of twenty-five he was appointed alférez (standard-bearer) to Sancho II. of Castile, a predatory monarch who drove his brother Alfonso from León and his brother García from Galicia, and annexed their kingdoms. Both campaigns gave the Cid opportunities of distinction, and he became the most conspicuous personage in Castile after the murder of Sancho II. by Bellido Dolfos at Zamora in 1072:—

¡Rey don Sancho, rey don Sancho, no digas que no te aviso

que de dentro de Zamora un alevoso ha salido!

llámase Vellido Dolfos, hijo de Dolfos Vellido,

cuatro traiciones ha hecho, y con esta serán cinco.

Si gran traidor fue el padre, mayor traidor es el hijo.—

Gritos dan en el real: ¡A don Sancho han mal herido:

muerto le ha Vellido Dolfos, gran traición ha cometido!

The Castilians were in a difficult position: the assassination of Sancho II. left them without a candidate for the vacant thrones of Castile and León. The Cid was not eligible; for, though of good family, he was not of royal—nor even of illustrious—descent. The sole legitimate claimant was the dethroned Alfonso, and there was nothing for it but to offer him both crowns. It is alleged that the exasperated Castilians found a salve for their wounded pride by inflicting a signal humiliation on the Leonese prince whom they invited to rule over them. According to tradition, Alfonso was compelled to swear that he had no complicity in Sancho’s death, and this oath was publicly administered to him by the Cid and eleven other Castilian representatives in the church of Santa Gadea at Burgos. This story reaches us in ancient romances, and Hartzenbusch has given it a further lease of life by dramatising it in La Jura en Santa Gadea. There may be some basis for it, and any one may believe it who can. There is, however, no positive proof that any such incident took place, and the tale reads rather like a later invention, fabricated to account for the bad blood made subsequently between the king and his formidable subject. Picturesque stories concerning historical personages are always ‘suspect,’ and are generally untrue. As there was no pretender in the field, why should Alfonso submit to insulting conditions? Is it not simpler to suppose that he regarded the Cid with natural suspicion as the man mainly responsible for his expulsion from León, and that the Leonese nobles were careful to keep this resentful memory alive? Now, as in the time of Fernán González:—

Castellanos y leoneses tienen malas intenciones.

Is it not intrinsically probable that the Cid, like a true Castilian, smarted under the Leonese supremacy; that his allegiance was from the outset reluctant and half-hearted; and that he scarcely troubled to conceal his ultimate design [6]of carving out for himself a semi-independent principality with the help of his famous sword Colada? However this may be, king and subject were, for the moment, mutually indispensable. Neither could afford an absolute breach at this stage; both were deep dissemblers; and on July 19, 1074, Alfonso VI. gave his cousin Jimena in marriage to the Cid. The wedding contract has been preserved—a prosaic document providing for the due disposition of property on the death of one of the contracting parties.

After this diplomatic marriage the Cid vanishes for some time into the dense obscurity of domestic bliss, emerging again into the light of history as defeating the Emir of Granada, and then as being charged with malversation. The details are by no means clear. What is clear is that the Cid was exiled about 1081, that he entered the service of Al-muktadir, Emir of Saragossa, and that he continued in the pay of the Emir’s successors—his son Al-mutamen, and his grandson Al-mustain. Henceforward we have a relatively full account of the Cid’s exploits. He defeated the combined forces of the King of Aragón, the Count of Barcelona and their Mohammedan allies at Almenara near Lérida; he routed the King of Aragón once more, this second battle being fought on the banks of the Ebro; he played fast-and-loose with Alfonso VI., was reconciled to his former master, quarrelled, and was again banished. His possessions were confiscated. But confiscation is a game at which subjects can play as well as kings, and the Cid was in a position to recoup his losses. By this time he had gathered round him a motley host of raiders, men of diverse creeds eager for any enterprise that offered chances of plunder. Fortune was now about to furnish him with a great opportunity. On the surrender of Toledo to Alfonso VI. in 1085 it was agreed that Yahya Al-kadir, the defeated Emir, should receive Valencia by way of compensation; and he was imposed on the restive inhabitants by a force under the Cid’s nephew, Alvar Fáñez Minaya. In ordinary circumstances the intruder might have held his own; but the incursion of the African Almoravides, the Jansenists of Mohammedanism, abruptly changed the political aspect. It soon became clear that the gains of the Reconquest were in jeopardy, and that Alfonso VI. must concentrate his army for a momentous struggle.

He might fairly plead that he had kept his bargain by installing the ex-Emir of Toledo at Valencia, and that his own kingdom was now at stake. He had no sooner recalled Alvar Fáñez and his troops than the Valencians revolted, and Al-kadir besought Al-mustain to come over and help him. The inducements offered were considerable. But Al-mustain was a mere figurehead at Saragossa; effective aid could come only from his lieutenant, the Cid: the two feigned acceptance of Al-kadir’s proposals, but secretly agreed to oust him and to divide the spoil. The relief expedition was commanded by the Cid in Al-mustain’s name. It was a post after his own heart. Valencia was then, as it is now, ‘the orchard of Spain,’ and the Cid was in no hurry to reach the capital. He ravaged the outlying districts of the fertile province, levied forced contributions, or induced the inhabitants to pay blackmail to escape his forays. He advanced cautiously, fortifying his position, and scattering delusive promises as he went along. He assured Alfonso VI. that he was working in the interest of Castile, and he assured Al-mustain that he was working in the interest of Saragossa; he encouraged Al-kadir to put down the Valencian rebels, and he encouraged the rebels to throw off Al-kadir’s authority. A master of dissimulation, resolved to make Valencia his own, he successfully deceived all parties till the murder of Al-kadir by Ibn-Jehaf, and the threatened advance of the Almoravides, forced him to drop the mask. Failing to carry the city of Valencia by storm, the Cid reduced it by starvation, and in June 1094 the Valencians surrendered on generous conditions. These conditions were flagrantly violated. Ibn-Jehaf was tortured till he revealed where his treasure was hidden; he was finally burned alive, his chief supporters shared his fate, and the Mohammedan population was given its choice between banishment and something like slavery.

In all but name the Cid was now a king, and he was careful to strengthen his hold on his prize. By taking a census of Christians, and by forbidding them to leave the city, he kept his most trustworthy troops together; and he promoted military efficiency as well as religion by founding a bishopric to which he nominated Jerónimo, the French prelate mentioned in the Poema del Cid, and as valiant a fighter as Archbishop Turpin in the Chanson de Roland:—

Tels curunez ne cantat unkes messe,

Ki de sus cors feïst tantes proeces.

The Cid came out of his trenches to rout the Almoravides at Quarte and in the valley of Alcoy; he extended his conquests to Murviedro, and formed an independent alliance with the King of Aragón. And, if the report of Ibn-Bassam, the Arab chronicler, be true, he had more vaulting ambitions: in a gust of exaltation, the Cid—so we are told—was heard to say that, as the first Roderick had lost Spain, a second Roderick might be destined to win it back. Ibn-Bassam writes in good faith, but he is a rhetorician, and moreover, in this case, he gives the story at second-hand. It is difficult to believe that a clear-headed, practical man like the Cid, who had recently found it hard enough to [9]seize a single province, can have talked in this wild way about winning back all Spain. If he did, his judgment was greatly at fault: the Reconquest was not completed till four centuries later, and little more was done towards furthering it during the Cid’s last days. His lieutenant, Alvar Fáñez, was beaten at Cuenca: the Almoravides, flushed with victory, again defeated the Cid’s picked troops at Alcira. The Cid was not present on the field, but the mortification was too much for him: he died—‘of grief and fury,’ so the Arab historians state—in July 1099. Supported by Alvar Fáñez and Bishop Jerónimo, Jimena held out for another two years: then she retreated northwards, after setting fire to the city. Valencia—the real ‘Valencia del Cid’—ceased to exist. The Christians marched out by the light of the flaming walls; the Cid’s embalmed body was mounted for the last time on Babieca (a horse as famous as Roland’s Veillantif), and was taken to San Pedro de Cardeña. There you may still see what was his tomb, with this inscription on it:—

Belliger, invictus, famosus marte triumphis,

Clauditur hoc tumulo magnus Didaci Rodericus.

But his body, after many vicissitudes, now rests in the unimposing town hall of Burgos.

This is the Cid Campeador as he appears in Ibn-Bassam’s Dhakira, written ten years after the Cid’s death, and in the anonymous Gesta Ruderici Campidocti which dates from between 1140 and 1170. The authors write from opposite points of view, and are not critical, but they are trustworthy in essentials, and a statement made by both may usually be taken as a fact, or as a close approximation to fact. The Cid, as you perceive, is far from being irreproachable. He has all the qualities, and therefore all the defects, of a mediæval soldier of fortune: he was brave, mercenary, perfidious and cruel. How, then, are we to account for his position as a national hero? In the first place, we must avoid the error of judging him by modern standards, and in the second place, we must bear in mind that almost all we learn of his later years—the best known period of his life—comes to us from enemies whose prejudices may have led them unconsciously to darken the shadows in the portrait. It is a shock to discover that the man who symbolises the spirit of Spanish patriotism was a border chief in the pay of the highest bidder; it is a greater shock to find that the man who figures as the type of knightly orthodoxy fought for the Mohammedans against the Christians. We must part with our simple-minded illusions, and admit that Pius V. was right in turning a deaf ear when Philip II. suggested (so it is said) the canonisation of the Cid. All heroes are apt to lose their glamour when dragged from the twilight of tradition and poetry into the fierce blaze of fact and history. The Cid is no exception. Renan sums up against him with gay severity. ‘Tout ce qu’il fut, il le dut aux ennemis de sa patrie, même le nom sous lequel il est resté dans l’histoire. Le représentant idéal de l’honneur espagnol était un condottiere, combattant tantôt pour le Christ, tantôt pour Mahomet. Le représentant idéal de l’amour n’a peut-être jamais aimé. Encore une idole qui tombe sous les coups de l’impitoyable critique!’

Yet, if it were worth while, a case might be made for the Cid without recourse to sophistry. It is enough to say that he acted as all other leaders acted in his age and for long afterwards. He was anything but a saint: if he had been a saint, he would never have become the idol of a nation. It has been thought that he had some consciousness of a providential mission, but this is perhaps a hasty generalisation based upon Ibn-Bassam’s story of his having said that a second Roderick might reconquer Spain. This theory ascribes to him more elevation of character and more political foresight than we can suppose him to have possessed. The supremacy of Castile was not an accepted political ideal till it was on the point of establishment, and this takes us forward, nearly a century and a half, to the reign of St. Ferdinand. The Cid was no idealist: he lived wholly in the present. The land of visions was never thrown open to him; he had no touch of Jeanne d’Arc’s mystical temperament; his aims were immediate, concrete, personal. His popularity was due, first of all, to his conspicuous and inspiring valour; due to the fact that the last and most celebrated of his expeditions, though undertaken primarily for his own profit, incidentally helped the cause of national unity by wresting a province from the Mohammedans; due to the instinctive feeling that he represented more or less faithfully the interests of Castile as against those of León—a feeling which found frank expression five centuries later in the Romancero general:—

Soy Rodrigo de Vivar,

castellano á las derechas.

And, no doubt, the man bore a stamp of self-confident greatness which awed his foes and fired the imagination of his countrymen. As posterity is apt to condone the crimes by which it gains, it is not surprising that later generations should minimise the Cid’s misdeeds, and should end by transforming his story almost out of recognition. But these capricious and often grotesque travesties are relatively modern.

They are not found to any excess in the work of the earliest poets who sang the Cid’s feats-of-arms. They do not occur in the Latin poem, already quoted, which speaks enthusiastically of his exploits as being numerous enough to tax the resources of Homer’s genius:—

Tanti victoris nam si retexere,

Coeperim cuncta, non haec libri mille

Capere possent, Homero canente,

Summo labore.

This cannot have been written much later than 1120, about a score of years after the Cid’s death. The theme, like many another theme of the same kind, was too alluring to be left to monks who wrote in a learned language for a small circle, and it was soon treated in the speech of the people by juglares—not necessarily laymen—who recited their compositions in palaces, castles, monasteries, public squares, markets, or any other place where an audience could be got together. In this way a body of epical poems came into existence. You may say that this is late, and so it is if you are thinking of Beowulf and Waldhere which, in their actual shapes, certainly existed before the reign of Alfred, and have even been assigned to the sixth century. But we must make a radical distinction. Beowulf and Waldhere are, we may say, sagas in verse, and have no immediate relation to England, so far as subject goes: the French and Spanish epics are conspicuously national in theme and sentiment. We know that Spain possessed many epics which have not survived: epics on Roderick, on Bernardo del Carpio, on Fernán González, on Garci-Fernández, on Sancho García, perhaps on Alvar Fáñez Minaya, the Cid’s lieutenant. Only three of these ancient cantares de gesta have been saved, and among them is the epic known as the Poema del Cid, Possibly it was not the first vernacular poem on the subject, though it was composed about the middle of the twelfth century, some fifty years after the Cid’s time; but, as we shall see presently, there is a long interval between the [13]date of composition and the date of transcription. As to the author of the Poema nothing is known. On the ground that some two hundred lines relate to events occurring at the monastery of Cardeña near Burgos, it has been conjectured that the author was a monk attached to this monastery. It has also been thought, owing to his warlike spirit, that he was a layman, and that he came from the Valle de Arbujuelo: this is inferred from his minute knowledge of the country between Molina and San Esteban de Gormaz, and from the relative vagueness of such knowledge as the itinerary extends to Burgos and Saragossa. These, however, are but surmises. It is further surmised that the substance of the Poema del Cid may be derived from earlier epic poems. That may be: but, as it stands, it has a unity of its own.

The Gesta Ruderici Campidocti survives in a unique manuscript which was stolen during the last century from the Monastery of St. Isidore at León, was bought in Lisbon by Gotthold Heyne two years before he died on the Berlin barricades of 1848, and is now, after many wanderings, in the Academy of History at Madrid. The Poema del Cid also reaches us in a unique manuscript, the work of a certain Per Abbat who in 1307 wrote out the text from a pre-existing copy; this manuscript is not known to have passed through any such adventures as the Gesta, but it has evidently had some narrow escapes from destruction: the beginning of the Poema del Cid is missing, a page is wanting after verse 2337, and another page is wanting after verse 3307. Had Per Abbat not taken the trouble to write out the Poema, or had his manuscript disappeared before October 1596 (when it was transcribed by Juan Ruiz de Ulibarri), the epic on the Cid would be as unknown to us as the epics on Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, and the rest. Per Abbat seems to have followed an unfaithful copy in an uncritical fashion, but the defects in the existing text cannot all be laid at his door. There are passages in the Poema del Cid which are almost universally regarded as interpolations, and for these Per Abbat is not likely to be responsible. It is more probable that he continued in the bad way of his predecessors, who apparently took it upon themselves to abridge the poem. This desire for greater brevity is answerable for transpositions and corruptions which are the despair of editors and translators; but, mutilated as it is, the Poema del Cid is a primitive masterpiece, the merits of which have been increasingly recognised since the text was first published by Tomás Antonio Sánchez in 1779.

The interest in the literary monuments of the Middle Ages was not then what it is now. We are talking of a period more than half a century before any French chanson de geste was printed, and the taste for mediævalism had still to be created. The Spanish poet, Quintana, who died only fifty years ago, and was a lad when the Poema del Cid was published, could see nothing to admire in it; and yet Quintana’s taste in literature was far more catholic than that of most of his contemporaries. Still the Poema slowly made its way in the world of letters. One illustration will suffice to show that it was closely studied within a few years of its appearance in print. John Hookham Frere, the British Minister at Madrid, read the Poema del Cid on the recommendation of the Marqués de la Romana, who had praised it as ‘the most animated and highly poetical as well as the most ancient and curious poem in the language.’ In verse 2348 of the Poema:—

Aun vea el hora que vos merezca dos tanto—

the curt reply of Pero Bermuez to the Infantes of Carrión—Frere [15]proposed to read merezcades for merezca dos, and his conjectural emendation was approved by Romana to whom alone he mentioned it. Some years later Romana was destined to hear it again in striking circumstances. He was then serving with the French in Denmark, and it became necessary for Frere to communicate with him confidentially. It was indispensable that Frere’s messenger should be fully accredited; it was of the utmost importance that, in case of arrest, he should not be found in possession of any paper which might suggest his mission. The emended verse of the Poema del Cid, easily remembered, formed his sole credentials. Romana at once knew that the agent must come from Frere, who—apart from his fragmentary translation of the Poema, now superseded by Ormsby’s version—thus began in a small amateurish way the work of critical reconstitution which has been continued by Damas-Hinard and Bello, by Cornu and Restori, by Vollmöller and Lidforss, by Sr. D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Mr. Archer Milton Huntington.

Thanks to these and other scholars whose labours cannot be adequately acknowledged by any formal compliment, the text of the Poema del Cid has been purged of many corruptions, and made vastly more intelligible. But there are still problems to be solved in connection with it. What, for instance, is the relation of the Spanish epic to the French? The ‘patriotic bias’ should have no place in historical or literary judgments, but this is a counsel of perfection. Scholars are extremely human, and experience shows that the ‘patriotic bias’ often intrudes itself unseasonably in their work. In writing of the French chansons de geste, Gaston Paris says:—‘L’Espagne s’en inspirait dès le milieu du XII^e siècle pour chanter le Cid, et composait, même sur les sujets carolingiens des cantares de gesta dont quelques débris se retrouvent dans les romances du XV^e siècle.’ Rightly interpreted, this is a fair statement of the case. But earlier French scholars inclined to exaggerate the amount of Spain’s indebtedness to France in this respect, and—by a not unnatural reaction—there is a tendency among the younger generation of Spanish scholars to minimise it. We are not called upon to take part in this contention of wits: we are not concerned here to-day with ingenious special pleas, but with facts.

It is a fact that the earliest extant French chanson de geste was in existence a century before the earliest extant Spanish cantar de gesta: it is also a fact that the French version of Roland’s story was widely diffused in Spain at an early date. It was there recorded in the forged chronicle ascribed to Archbishop Turpin, and it filtered down to the masses who heard it from French pilgrims on the road to the shrine of St. James at Santiago de Compostela. Among these pilgrims were French trouvères, and through them the Spaniards became acquainted with the Chanson de Roland. It was natural that suggestion should operate in Spain as it operated in Germany, where Konrad produced his Rolandslied about the year 1130. There is at least a strong presumption that the author of the Poema del Cid had heard the Chanson de Roland. Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, whose patriotism and fine literary sense make him a witness above suspicion, admits that there is a marked resemblance between the battle-scenes in the two poems, and further allows that there are cases of verbal coincidence which cannot be accidental. We may therefore agree with Gaston Paris that the author of the Poema del Cid found his inspiration in the Chanson de Roland: that is to say, the Chanson probably suggested to him the idea of composing a similar work on a Spanish theme, and gave him a few secondary details. We cannot say less, nor more: except that in subject and sentiment the Poema is intensely local.

As regards its substance, the Poema is intermediate between history and fable. There is no respect for chronology; one personage is mistaken for a namesake; the Cid’s daughters, whose real names were Cristina and María, are called Elvira and Sol, and are provided with husbands to whom they were never married in fact, but who may have been maliciously introduced (as Dozy surmised) to exhibit the Leonese in an odious light. It is the office of an epic poet to exalt his hero, and to belittle that hero’s enemies; you might as reasonably look for perfect execution in the Poema del Cid as for judicial impartiality. Apart from freaks which may be due to bad copying, we accept the fact that the metre is capricious, fluctuating between lines of fourteen and sixteen syllables: we must also accept the fact that history fares no better than metre, and often fares worse. Yet the spirit of the poet is not consciously unhistorical; he conveys the impression of believing in the truth of his own story. There is an accent of deep sincerity from the outset, in what—owing to mutilation—is now the beginning of the Poema, a passage recording the exile of the Cid:—

With tearful eyes he turned to gaze upon the wreck behind:

His rifled coffers, bursten gates, all open to the wind:

No mantle left, nor robe of fur: stript bare his castle hall:

Nor hawk nor falcon in the mew, the perches empty all.

Then forth in sorrow went my Cid, and a deep sigh sighed he;

Yet with a measured voice, and calm, my Cid spake loftily—

‘I thank thee, God our Father, thou that dwellest upon high,

I suffer cruel wrong to-day, but of mine enemy.’

As they came riding from Bivar the crow was on the right,

By Burgos gate, upon the left, the crow was there in sight.

My Cid he shrugged his shoulders, and he lifted up his head:

‘Good tidings, Alvar Fáñez! we are banished men!’ he said.

[18]With sixty lances in his train my Cid rode up the town,

The burghers and their dames from all the windows looking down;

And there were tears in every eye, and on each lip one word:

‘A worthy vassal—would to God he served a worthy Lord!’

Fain would they shelter him, but none dared yield to his desire.

Great was the fear through Burgos town of King Alfonso’s ire.

Sealed with his royal seal hath come his letter to forbid

All men to offer harbourage or succour to my Cid.

And he that dared to disobey, well did he know the cost—

His goods, his eyes, stood forfeited, his soul and body lost.

A hard and grievous word was that to men of Christian race;

And since they might not greet my Cid, they hid them from his face.

He rode to his own mansion gates; shut firm and fast they were,

Such the King’s rigour, save by force, he might not enter there.

We cannot tell how the poem began in its complete state. Some scholars think that what is missing was merely a short unimportant prelude; others believe that the Poema del Cid, as we have it, is but the ending of a vast epic. It must have been vast indeed, for the fragment that survives amounts to 3735 lines; the Chanson de Roland consists of 4001 lines, and it seems improbable that the Poema was much longer. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine a more spirited opening than that which chance has given us. The Cid is introduced at a critical moment, misjudged, calumniated, a loyal subject driven from his own Castilian home by an ungrateful Leonese king. There is something spacious in the atmosphere, there is a stately simplicity even in the deliberate repetition of conventional epithet—‘the Castilian,’ ‘he who was born in a good hour,’ ‘the good one of Bivar,’ ‘my Cid,’ and rarely—very rarely—‘the Cid.’ The poet lauds his hero, as he should, but does not degrade him by fulsome eulogy; he is in touch with realities. He seems to feel that the Cid is great enough to afford to have the truth told about him; with engaging simplicity the Poema relates how the crafty chief imposed on the two Jews, Raquel and Vidas, by depositing with them two chests purporting to be full of gold (but really containing sand), and how he fraudulently borrowed six hundred marks on this worthless security. In the Crónica general, a passage founded on a re-cast of the Poema represents the Cid as refunding the money, and in the Romancero general of 1602 an anonymous ballad-writer excused the trickery on the plea that the chests contained the gold of the Cid’s truth:—

No habeis fiado

vuestro dinero por prendas,

mas solo del Cid honrado,

que dentro de aquestos cofres

os dejó depositado

el oro de su verdad,

que es tesoro no preciado.

But there is neither casuistry nor other-worldliness in the primitive poet. He clearly looks upon the incident as a normal business transaction, describes the Cid as postponing payment when the Jews put in their claim, and sees no inconsistency between this passage and an earlier one which vouches for the Cid’s fine sense of honour. We read that the Count of Barcelona, on his release,

spurred his steed; but, as he rode, a backward glance he bent

Still fearing to the last my Cid his promise would repent:

A thing, the world itself to win, my Cid would not have done;

No perfidy was ever found in him, the Perfect One.

No doubt the Poema del Cid is very unequal. Too often it degenerates into tracts of arid prose divided into lines of irregular length with a final monotonous assonance: there are too many deserts dotted with matter-of-fact details, names of insignificant places, and the like. But the poet recovers [20]himself, glows with local patriotism when recording a gallant feat, and humanises his story with traits of gentler sympathy—as when describing the parting of the Cid from Jimena and his daughters at the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña. And the Spanish juglar has the faculty of rapid, dramatic presentation. His secondary personages are made visible with a few swift strokes—the learned Bishop Jerónimo who, attracted by the Cid’s fame as a fighter, comes from afar (‘de parte de orient’), and would almost as soon miss a Mass as a battle with the Moors; the grim Alvar Fáñez, the Cid’s right arm, his ‘diestro braço’ as Roland was Charlemagne’s ‘destre braz’; the Cid’s nephew, Félez Muñoz, always at the post of danger; the stolid, inscrutable Pero Bermuez, the standard-bearer whose habitual muteness is transformed into eloquent invective when the hour comes for denouncing the poltroonery of the Infantes of Carrión; and even these fictitious rascals have an air of plausibility and life. In the Poema del Cid we meet for the first time with that forcible realistic touch, that alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of authenticity. And the poem ends on an exultant note with a pæan over the defeat of the imaginary Infantes of Carrión, the really historical betrothal of the Cid’s daughters, and the triumphant passing of the Cid, reconciled to the King:—

And he that in a good hour was born, behold how he hath sped!

His daughters now to higher rank and greater honour wed:

Sought by Navarre and Aragon for queens his daughters twain!

And monarchs of his blood to-day upon the throne of Spain.

And so his honour in the land grows greater day by day.

Upon the feast of Pentecost from life he passed away.

For him and all of us the grace of Christ let us implore.

And here ye have the story of my Cid Campeador.

The Poema is the oldest and most important existing epic on the Cid, but there is ample proof that his deeds were sung in other cantares de gesta of early date—earlier than the compilation of Alfonso the Learned’s Crónica general, which was finished in 1268. Recent investigations place this beyond doubt. It was long supposed that the chapters on the Cid in the Crónica general were largely derived from the Poema, but Sr. D. Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s researches into the history of the text of the Crónica general have shown that this view is untenable. The printed text of the Crónica general, issued by Florián de Ocampo at Zamora in 1541, is not what it was thought to be—namely, the original compiled by order of Alfonso the Learned: it lies at three removes from that original, and this fact throws new light on the history of epic poetry in Spain. Briefly stated, the results of the recent researches are these: the First Crónica general was utilised in another chronicle compiled in 1344; this Second Crónica general was condensed in an abridgment which has disappeared; this last abridgment of the Second Crónica general is now represented by three derivatives—the Third Crónica general issued by Ocampo, the Crónica de Castilla, and the Crónica de Veinte Reyes. And it is further established that pre-existing cantares de gesta on the Cid were utilised in the chronicles as follows: the Poema del Cid (from verse 1094 onwards) was used only in the Crónica de Veinte Reyes, while what concerns the Cid in the first Crónica general comes principally—not (as was believed) from the Poema del Cid as we know it, but—from another epic, no longer in existence, which began and continued in very much the same way as the Poema for about 1250 lines, where the resemblance ended. The chapters on the Cid in the Second Crónica general derive mainly from another vanished cantar de gesta which coincided to some extent with a surviving epic on the Cid known as the Crónica rimada, or (less generally) as the Cantar de Rodrigo.

This Crónica rimada, apparently written by a juglar in the diocese of Palencia, was thought by Dozy to be older than the Poema del Cid, and Dozy has been made to feel his error. But let us not reproach him, as though we were infallible. Dozy undeniably overestimated the age of the Crónica rimada as a whole; still the critical instinct of this great scholar led him to conclude that it was a composite work, that its component parts were not all of the same period, and (a conclusion afterwards confirmed by Milá y Fontanals) that the passage relating to King Fernando (v. 758 ff.)—

El buen rey don Fernando par fue de emperador—

is the oldest fragment embodied in the text. In these respects Dozy’s views are admitted to be correct. The Crónica rimada, which in its present form is assigned to about the end of the fourteenth century, is an amalgam of diverse and inappropriate materials, and scarcely deserves to be regarded as an original poem at all. If it is probable that the author of the Poema del Cid had heard the Chanson de Roland, it is still more probable that the author of the Crónica rimada had heard Garin le Lohérain. Not only does he incorporate part of a lost cantar de gesta on King Fernando; he borrows from other lost Spanish epics, from the existing Poema del Cid, from degraded oral traditions, and perhaps from foreign sources not yet identified. The patchwork is a poor thing pieced together by an imitator who has lost the secret of the primitive epic, and insincerely commemorates exploits which he must have known to be fabulous—such as the Cid’s expedition to France, and his triumph under the walls of Paris. But, though greatly [23]inferior to the Poema, the Crónica rimada is interesting in substance and manner. It includes primitive versions of legends which, in more refined and elaborate forms, were destined to become famous throughout Europe: the quarrel between the Cid’s father and Count Gómez de Gormaz (not in consequence of a blow, or anything connected with an extravagantly artificial code of honour, but over a matter of sheep-stealing); the death of the Count at the hands of the Cid, not yet thirteen years of age; and the marriage of the Count’s daughter Jimena to her father’s slayer, who is represented as a reluctant bridegroom:—

Ally despossavan a doña Ximena Gomes con Rodrigo el Castellano.

Rodrigo respondió muy sannudo contra el rey Castellano:

Señor, vos me despossastes mas a mi pessar que de grado.

The Cid in the Poema is a loyal subject, faithful to his alien King under extreme provocation. In the Crónica rimada he is transformed into a haughty, turbulent feudal baron, more like the Cid of the later Spanish ballads or romances; and it is worth noting that the irregular versification of the Crónica rimada, in which lines of sixteen syllables predominate, approximates roughly to the metre of the romances, to which I shall return in a later lecture. For the moment it is enough to say that by 1612 there were enough ballads on the Cid to form a romancero, and that in the most complete modern collection they amount to 205. Southey and Ormsby, both ardent admirers of the Poema, thought that the romances on the Cid impressed ‘more by their number than their light,’ and no doubt these ballads vary greatly in merit. But a few are really admirable—such as the romance adapted with masterly skill by Lope de Vega in Las Almenas de Toro.

The mention of this great dramatist reminds one that the Cid underwent another transformation in the theatre. Guillén de Castro introduced him in Las Mocedades del Cid as the central figure in a dramatic conflict between love and filial duty; Corneille took over the situation, and created a masterpiece which completely overshadowed Castro’s play. The names of other dramatists who treated the same theme are very properly forgotten: another great dramatisation of the Cid’s story is about as likely as another great dramatisation of the story of Romeo and Juliet. But the poetic possibilities of the Cid legend are inexhaustible. Nearly fifty years ago Victor Hugo, then in the noontide of his incomparable genius, reincarnated the primitive Cid in the first series of La Légende des siècles. Who can forget the impression left by the first reading of Quand le Cid fut entré dans le Généralife, by the sixteen poems which form the Romancero du Cid, by the interview between the Cid and the sheik Jabias in Bivar, and by that wonder of symbolism Le Cid exilé? It is as unhistorical as you please, but marvellous for its grandiose vision and haunting music:—

Et, dans leur antichambre, on entend quelquefois

Les pages, d’une voix féminine et hautaine,

Dire:—Ah oui-da, le Cid! c’était un capitaine

D’alors. Vit-il encor, ce Campéador-là?

The question was soon answered. Within three years a fiercer—perhaps a more melodramatic—aspect of the Cid was revealed by Leconte de Lisle in three pieces which contributed to the sombre splendour of the Poèmes barbares, and now appear among the Poèmes tragiques; and thirty years later, in our own day, José Maria de Heredia, the Benvenuto of French verse, included a figure of the Cid among his glittering Trophées. These three are masters of their craft, and one of them is the greatest poet of his time; but their puissant art has not superseded the virile creation of the nameless, candid, patriotic singer who wrote the Poema del Cid some eight hundred years ago.

CHAPTER II
THE ARCHPRIEST OF HITA

Many of the earliest poems extant in Castilian are anonymous, impersonal compositions, more or less imitative. The Misterio de los Reyes Magos, for instance, is suggested by a Latin Office used at Orleans; the Libro de Apolonio, the Vida de Santa María Egipciacqua, the Libro dels tres Reyes dorient, and the Libro de Alixandre are from French sources. French influence is likewise visible in the work of Gonzalo de Berceo, the earliest Spanish poet whose name we know for certain; writing in the first half of the thirteenth century, Berceo draws largely on the Miracles de Nostre Dame, a collection of edifying legends versified by Gautier de Coinci, Prior of the monastery at Vic-sur-Aisne. As Gautier died in 1236, the speed with which his version of these pious stories passed from France to Spain goes to show that literary communication had already been established between the two countries. At one time or another during the Middle Ages all Western Europe followed the French lead in literature. From about 1130, when Konrad wrote his Rolandslied, French influence prevailed in Germany for a century, affecting poets so considerable as Hartmann von Aue, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and Gottfried von Strassburg. French influence was dominant in Italy from before the reign of Frederick II., the patron of the Provençal poets and the chief of the Sicilian school of poetry, till the coming of Dante; French [26]versions of tales of Troy, Alexander, Cæsar and Charlemagne were translated; so also were French versions of the Arthurian legend, as we gather from the celebrated passage in the fifth canto of the Inferno:—

La bocca mi baciò tutto tremante:

Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse:

Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

You all know that French influence was most noticeable in England from Layamon’s time to Chaucer’s, and that Chaucer himself, besides translating part of the Roman de la Rose, borrowed hints from Guillaume de Machault and Oton de Granson—two minor poets whose works, by the way, were treasured by the Marqués de Santillana, of whom I shall have something to say in the next lecture. Wherever we turn at this period, sooner or later we shall find that French literature has left its mark. Scandinavian scholars inform us that the Strengleikar includes translations of Marie de France’s lais; and Floire et Blanchefleur was also done into Icelandic at the beginning of the fourteenth century when the Archpriest of Hita—who refers appreciatively to this French romance—was still young. Jean Bodel’s well-worn couplet is a trite statement of fact:—

Ne sont que trois matières à nul homme attendant,

De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome le grant.

This rapid summary is enough to prove that Spain, in copying French originals, was doing no more than other countries. The work of her early singers has the interest which attaches to every new literary experiment, but the great mass of it necessarily lacks originality and force. It was not until the fourteenth century was fairly advanced that Spain produced two authors of unmistakable individual genius. One of these was the Infante Don Juan Manuel, the earliest prose-writer of real distinction in Castilian, and the other was Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, near Guadalajara. We know scarcely anything certain about Ruiz except his name and status which he gives incidentally when invoking the divine assistance in writing his work:—

E por que de todo bien es comienço e rays

la virgen santa marja por ende yo Joan Rroys

açipreste de fita della primero fis

cantar de los sus goços siete que ansi dis.

In one of the manuscripts[2] which contain his poems, his messenger Trotaconventos seems to state his birthplace:—

Fija, mucho vos saluda uno que es de Alcalá.

It has been inferred from this that the Archpriest was a native of Alcalá de Henares, and therefore a fellow-townsman of Cervantes. It is possible that he may have been, but the Gayoso manuscript gives a variant on the reading in the Salamanca manuscript:—

Fija, mucho vos saluda uno que mora en Alcalá.

The truth is that we do not know where and when Juan Ruiz was born, nor where and when he died. It is thought that he was born towards the end of the thirteenth century, and Sr. Puyol y Alonso in his interesting monograph suggests 1283 as a likely date: but these are conjectures. Many persons, however, find it difficult to resign themselves to humble agnosticism, and, by drawing on imagination for fact, endeavour to construct what we may call hypothetical biographies. Ruiz is an unpromising subject, yet he has not escaped altogether. A writer of comparatively modern date—Francisco de Torres, author of an unpublished Historia de Guadalajara—alleges that the Archpriest was living at Guadalajara in 1410. It is difficult to reconcile this statement with the assertion made by Alfonso Paratinén who seems to have been the copyist of the Salamanca manuscript. At the end of his copy Paratinén writes: ‘This is the Archpriest of Hita’s book which he composed, being imprisoned by order of the Cardinal Don Gil, Archbishop of Toledo.’ This refers to Don Gil de Albornoz, an able, pushing prelate who was Archbishop of Toledo from 1337 till his death in 1367. It is known that Don Gil de Albornoz was exiled from Spain by Peter the Cruel in 1350, and that on January 7, 1351, one Pedro Fernández had succeeded Juan Ruiz as Archpriest of Hita. Now, according to stanza 1634 in the Salamanca manuscript, Ruiz finished his work in 1381 of the Spanish Era:—

Era de mjll e tresjentos e ochenta e vn años

fue conpuesto el rromançe, por muchos males e daños

que fasen muchos e muchas aotras con sus engaños

e por mostrar alos synplex fablas e versos estraños.

The year 1381 of the Spanish Era corresponds to 1343 in our reckoning, and we may accept the statement in the text that Juan Ruiz wrote his poem at this date. We may further take it that the poem was written in jail. We might refuse to believe this on the sole authority of Alfonso Paratinén whose copy was not made till the end of the fourteenth (or the beginning of the fifteenth) century; but the copyist is corroborated by the author who, in each of [29] his first three stanzas, begs God to free him from the prison in which he lies:—

libra Amj dios desta presion do yago.

It is reasonable to assume that Juan Ruiz was well past middle age when he wrote his book; hence it is almost incredible that, as Torres states, he survived his imprisonment by nearly sixty years. There is nothing, except the absence of proof, against the current theory that the Archpriest died in prison—possibly at Toledo—shortly before January 7, 1351, when Pedro Fernández took his place at Hita; but there is nothing, except the same absence of proof, against a counter-theory that he was released before this date, that he followed Don Gil Albornoz into exile, and that he died at Avignon. All such theories are, I repeat, in the nature of hypothetical biography. We have no data, and are left to ramble in the field of conjecture.

Some idea of the Archpriest’s personality may, however, be gathered from his work. We are not told how long he was in jail, nor what his offence was. He himself declares in his Cántica, de loores de Santa María that his punishment was unjust:—

Santa virgen escogida ...

del mundo salud e vida ...

de aqueste dolor que siento

en presion syn meresçer,

tu me deña estorcer

con el tu deffendjmjento.

His testimony in his own favour is not conclusive. Possibly, as Sr. Puyol y Alonso suggests, Juan Ruiz may have offended some of the upper clergy by ridiculing them in much the same way as he satirises the Dean and Chapter in his Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera where influential dignitaries are most disrespectfully mentioned by name, or perhaps made recognisable under transparent pseudonyms. The Archpriest is more likely to have been imprisoned for some such indiscretion than for loose living. Clerical morality was at a low point in Spain during the fourteenth century, and, though Juan Ruiz was a disreputable cleric, he was no worse than many of his brethren. But he was certainly no better than most of them. His first editor, Tomás Antonio Sánchez, acting against the remonstrances of Jove-Llanos and the Spanish Academy of History, contrived to lend Juan Ruiz a false air of respectability by omitting from the text some objectionable passages and by bowdlerising others. Sánchez did not foresee that his good intentions would be frustrated by José Amador de los Ríos, who thoughtfully collected the scandalous stanzas which had been omitted, and printed them by themselves in the Ilustraciones to the fourth volume of his Historia de la literatura española. If Sánchez had made Juan Ruiz seem better than he was, Ríos made him seem worse. Yet Ríos had succeeded somehow in persuading himself that Juan Ruiz was an excellent man who voluntarily became ‘a holocaust of the moral idea which he championed.’ Few who read the Archpriest’s poem are likely to share this view. It would be an exaggeration to say that he was an unbeliever, for, though he indulges in irreverent parodies of the liturgy, his verses to the Blessed Virgin are unmistakably sincere; he was a criminous clerk like many of his contemporaries who had taken orders as the easiest means of gaining a livelihood; but, unlike these jovial goliards, the sensual Archpriest had the temperament of a poet as well as the tastes of a satyr. It is as a poet that he interests us, as the author of a work the merits of which can scarcely be overestimated as regards its ironical, picaresque presentation of scenes of clerical and lay life. The Archpriest was no literary fop, but he was dimly aware that he had left behind him a work that would keep his memory alive:—

ffis vos pequeno libro de testo, mas la glosa,

non creo que es chica antes es byen grand prosa,

que sobre cada fabla se entyende otra cosa,

syn la que se alega en la rason fermosa.

De la santidat mucha es byen grand lycionario,

mas de juego e de burla chico breujario,

per ende fago punto e çierro mj almario,

sea vos chica fabla solas e letuario.

The very name of his book, which has but recently become available in a satisfactory form, has long been doubtful. About a century after it was written, Alfonso Martínez de Toledo, the Archpriest of Talavera, called it a Tratado; a few years later than the Archpriest of Talavera, Santillana referred to it curtly as the Libro del Arcipreste de Hita; Sánchez entitled it Poesías when he issued it in 1790, and Florencio Janer republished it in 1864 as the Libro de Cantares. But, as Wolf pointed out in 1831,[3] Ruiz himself speaks of it as the Libro de buen amor. However, we do not act with any indecent haste in these matters, and it was not till just seventy years later that Wolf’s hint was taken by M. Ducamin. We can at last read the Libro de buen amor more or less as Ruiz wrote it; or, rather, we can read the greater part of it, for fragments are missing, some passages having been removed from the manuscripts, perhaps by over-modest readers. Yet much remains to do. A diplomatic edition is valuable, but it is only an instalment of what we need. If any one amongst you is in search of a tough piece of work, he can do no better for himself and us than by preparing a critical edition of the Libro de buen amor with a commentary and—above all—a vocabulary.

The Archpriest of Hita was an original genius, but his originality consists in his personal attitude towards life and in his handling of old material. No literary genius, however great, can break completely with the past, and the Archpriest underwent the influence of his predecessors at home. It is the fashion nowadays to say that he was not learned, and no doubt he poses at times as a simpering provincial ignoramus, especially as regards ecclesiastical doctrine and discipline:—

Escolar so mucho rrudo, njn maestro njn doctor,

aprendi e se poco para ser demostrador.

But the Archpriest does not wish to be taken at his word, and, to prevent any possible misunderstanding, in almost the next breath he slyly advises his befooled reader to consult the Espéculo as well as

los libros de ostiense, que son grand parlatorio,

el jnocençio quarto, vn sotil consistorio,

el rrosario de guido, nouela e diratorio.

He dabbles in astrology, notes (with something like a wink) that a man’s fate is ruled by the planet under which he is born, and cites Ptolemy and Plato to support a theory which is so comfortable an excuse for his own pleasant vices. We shall see that he knew much of what was best worth knowing in French literature, and that he knew something of colloquial Arabic appears from the Moorish girl’s replies to Trotaconventos. Probably enough his allusions to Plato and Aristotle imply nothing more solid in the way of learning than Chaucer’s allusion to Pythagoras in The Book of the Duchesse. Still he seems to have known Latin, French, Arabic, and perhaps Italian, besides his native [33] language, and we cannot lay stress on his ignorance without appearing to reflect disagreeably on the clergy of to-day. The Archpriest was not, of course, a mediæval scholiast, much less an exact scholar in the modern sense; but, for a man whose lot was cast in an insignificant village, his reading and general culture were far above the average. A brief examination of the Libro de buen amor will make this clear: it will also show that the Archpriest had qualities more enviable than all the learning in the world.

He opens with forty lines invoking the blessing of God upon his work, and then he descends suddenly into prose, quoting copiously from Scripture, insisting on the purity of his motives, and asserting that his object is to warn men and women against foolish or unhallowed love. Having lulled the suspicions of uneasy readers with this unctuous preamble, he parenthetically observes: ‘Still, as it is human nature to sin, in case any should choose to indulge in foolish love (which I do not advise), various methods of the same will be found set out here.’ After thus disclosing his real intention, he announces his desire to show by example how every detail of poetry should be executed artistically—segund que esta çiencia requiere—and returns to verse. He again commends his work to God, celebrates the joys of Our Lady, and then proceeds to write a sort of picaresque novel in the metre known as the mester de clerecía—a quatrain of monorhymed alexandrines.

The Archpriest begins by quoting Dionysius Cato[4] to the effect that, though man may have his trials, he should cultivate a spirit of gaiety. And, as no man in his wits can laugh without cause, Juan Ruiz undertakes to provide entertainment, but hopes that he may not be misunderstood as was the Greek when he argued with the Roman. This allusion gives the writer his opportunity, and he relates a story which recalls the episode of Panurge’s argument with Thaumaste, ‘ung grand clerc d’Angleterre.’ Briefly, the tale is this. When the Romans besought the Greeks to grant them laws, they were required to prove themselves worthy of the privilege, and, as the difference of language made verbal discussion impossible, it was agreed that the debate should be carried on by signs (Thaumaste, you may remember, preferred signs because ‘les matières sont tant ardues, que les parolles humaines ne seroyent suffisantes à les expliquer à mon plaisir’). The Greek champion was a master of all learning, while the Romans were represented by an illiterate ragamuffin dressed in a doctor’s gown. The sage held up one finger, the lout held up his thumb and two fingers; the sage stretched out his open hand, the lout shook his fist violently. This closed the argument, for the wise Greek hastily admitted that the Roman claim was justified. On being asked to interpret the gestures which had perplexed the multitude, the Greek replied: ‘I said that there was one God, the Roman answered that there were three Persons in one God, and made the corresponding sign; I said that everything was governed by God’s will, the Roman answered that the whole world was in God’s power, and he spoke truly; seeing that they understood and believed in the Trinity, I agreed that they were worthy to receive laws.’ The Roman’s interpretation differed materially: ‘He held up one finger, meaning that he would poke my eye out; as this infuriated me, I answered by threatening to gouge both his eyes out with my two fingers, and smash his teeth with my thumb; he held out his open palm, meaning that he would deal me such a cuff as would make my ears tingle; I answered back that I would give him such a punch as he would never forget as long as he lived.’ The humour is distinctly primitive, but Juan Ruiz bubbles over with contagious merriment as he rhymes the tale, and goes on to warn the reader against judging anything—more especially the Libro de buen amor—by appearances:—

la bulrra que oyeres non la tengas en vil,

la manera del libro entiendela sotil;

que saber bien e mal, desjr encobierto e donegujl,

tu non fallaras vno de trobadores mjll.

Then, in his digressive way, the Archpriest avers that man, like the beasts that perish, needs food and a companion of the opposite sex, adding mischievously that this opinion, which would be highly censurable if he uttered it, becomes respectable when held by Aristotle.

Como dise Aristotiles, cosa es verdadera,

el mundo por dos cosas trabaja: por la primera

por aver mantenençia; la otra cosa era

por aver juntamjento con fenbra plasentera.

Sylo dixiese de mjo, seria de culpar;

diselo grand filosofo, non so yo de rebtar;

delo que dise el sabio non deuemos dubdar,

que por obra se prueva el sabio e su fablar.

Next the Archpriest, confessing himself to be a man of sin like the rest of us, relates how he was once in love with a Lady of Quality (too wary to be trapped by gifts) who rebuffed his messenger by saying that men were deceivers ever, and by quoting from ‘Ysopete’ an adaptation of the fable concerning the mountain in labour. The form ‘Ysopete’ suggests that the Archpriest used some French version of Æsop or Phaedrus, though not that of Marie de France, in whose translation (as edited by Warnke) this particular fable does not appear.

Undaunted by this check, the Archpriest does not lose his equanimity, reflects how greatly Solomon was in the right in saying that all is vanity, and determines to speak no ill of the coy dame, since women are, after all, the most delightful of creatures:—

mucho seria villano e torpe pajes

sy dela muger noble dixiese cosa rrefes,

ca en muger loçana, fermosa e cortes,

todo bien del mundo e todo plaser es.

A less squeamish beauty—otra non santa—attracted the fickle Archpriest, who wrote for her a troba cazurra, and employed Ferrand García as go-between. García courted the facile fair on his own account, and left Juan Ruiz to swear (as he does roundly) at a second fiasco. However, the Archpriest philosophically remarks that man cannot escape his fate, and illustrates this by telling how a Moorish king named Alcarás called in five astrologists to cast his son’s horoscope: all five predicted different catastrophes, and all five proved to be right. Comically enough, Juan Ruiz remembers at this point that he is a priest, disclaims all sympathy with fatalistic doctrine, and smugly adds that he believes in predestination only so far as it is compatible with the Catholic faith. But he forgets his orthodoxy as conveniently as he remembered it, rejoices that he was born under the sign of Venus (a beautifying planet which not only keeps young men young, but takes years off the old), and, since even the hardest pear ripens at last, he hopes for better luck. Yet he is disappointed in his attempt to beguile another Lady of Quality who proves to be (so to say) a bonâ fide holder for value, and the recital of this third misadventure ends with the fable of the thief and the dog.

At this point his neighbour Don Amor or Love comes to visit the chagrined Archpriest, and is angrily reproached for promising much and doing little beyond enfeebling man’s mental and physical powers—a point exemplified by a Spanish variant of that most indecorous fableau, the Valet aux douze femmes. After listening to fable upon fable, introduced to prove that he is in alliance with the Seven Deadly Sins, Love gently explains to the Archpriest that he is wrong to flare into a heat, that he has attempted to fly too high, that fine ladies are not for him, that he should study the Art of Love as expounded by Pamphilus and Ovid, that beauty is more than rank, and that he should enlist the services of an ingratiating old woman. Love quotes the tale of the two idlers who wished to marry, supplements this with the obscene story of Don Pitas Payas, and recommends the Archpriest to put money in his purse when he goes a-wooing. Part of this passage may be quoted in Gibson’s rendering:—

O money meikle doth, and in luve hath meikle fame,

It maketh the rogue a worthy wight, a carle of honest name,

It giveth a glib tongue to the dumb, snell feet unto the lame,

And he who lacketh both his hands will clutch it all the same.

A man may be a gawkie loon, and eke a hirnless brute,

But money makes him gentleman, and learnit clerk to boot;

For as his money bags do swell, so waxeth his repute,

But he whose purse has naught intill’t, must wear a beggar’s suit.

With money in thy fist thou need’st never lack a friend,0

The Pope will give his benison, and a happy life thou’lt spend,

Thou may’st buy a seat in paradise, and life withouten end,

Where money trickleth plenteouslie there blessings do descend.

I saw within the Court of Rome, of sanctitie the post,

That money was in great regard, and heaps of friends could boast,

That a’ were warstlin’ to be first to honour it the most,

And curchit laigh, and kneelit down, as if before the Host.

It maketh Priors, Bishops, and Abbots to arise,

Archbishops, Doctors, Patriarchs, and Potentates likewise,

It giveth Clerics without lair the dignities they prize,

It turneth falsitie to truth, and changeth truth to lies....

[38]

O Money is a Provost and Judge of sterling weight,

A Councillor the shrewdest, and a subtle Advocate;

A Constable and Bailiff of importance very great,

Of all officers that be, ’tis the mightiest in the state.

In brief I say to thee, at Money do not frown,

It is the world’s strong lever to turn it upside down,

It maketh the clown a master, the master a glarish clown,

Of all things in the present age it hath the most renown.

Finally Love sets to moralising, and departs after warning his client against over-indulgence in either white wine or red, holding up as an awful example the hermit who, after years of ascetic practices, got drunk for the first time in his life, and committed atrocious crimes which brought him to the gallows. The Archpriest ponders over Love’s seductive precepts, finds that his conduct hitherto has been in accordance with them, determines to persevere in the same crooked but pleasant path, and looks forward to the future with glad confidence. He straightway consults Love’s wife—Venus—concerning a new passion which (as he says) he has conceived for Doña Endrina, a handsome young widow of Calatayud. Whatever may be the case with the Archpriest’s other love affairs, this episode in the Libro de buen amor is imaginative, being an extremely brilliant hispaniolisation of a dreary Latin play entitled De Amore, ascribed to a misty personage known as Pamphilus Maurilianus—apparently a monk who lived during the twelfth century. The old crone of the Latin play reappears in the Libro de buen amor as Urraca (better recognised by her nickname of Trotaconventos), Galatea becomes Doña Endrina, and Pamphilus becomes Don Melón de la Uerta. There are passages in which Don Melón de la Uerta seems, at first sight, to be a pseudonym of the Archpriest’s; but the source of the story is beyond all doubt, for Juan Ruiz supplies a virtuous ending, and carefully explains that for the licentious character of the narrative Pamphilus and Ovid are responsible:—

doña endrina e don melon en vno casados son,

alegran se las conpañas en las bodas con rrason;

sy vjllanja ha dicho aya de vos perdon,

quelo felo de estoria dis panfilo e nason.

In order that there may be no misconception on this point, the Archpriest returns to it later, averring that no such experience ever befell him personally, and that he gives the story to set women on their guard against lying procuresses and bland lechers:—

Entyende byen mj estoria dela fija del endrino,

dixela per te dar ensienpro, non por que amj vjno;

guardate de falsa vieja, de rriso de mal vesjno,

sola con ome non te fyes, njn te llegues al espjno.

He resumes with an account of an enterprise which narrowly escaped miscarriage owing to a quarrel with Trotaconventos, to whom he had applied an uncomplimentary epithet in jest; but, seeing his blunder, he pacified his tetchy ally, and carried out his plan. Cast down by the sudden death of his mistress, he consoled himself by writing cantares cazurros which delighted all the ladies who read them (a privilege denied to us, for these compositions are not included in the existing manuscripts of the Libro de buen amor). Having recovered from his dejection, in the month of March the Archpriest went holiday-making in the mountains, where he met with a new type of women whose coming-on dispositions and robust charms he celebrates satirically. These cantigas de serrana,—slashing parodies on the Galician cantos de ledino,—perhaps the boldest and most interesting of his metrical experiments, are followed by copies of devout verses on Santa María del Vado and on the Passion of Christ.

The next transition is equally abrupt. While dining at Burgos with Don Jueves Lardero (the last Thursday before Lent), the Archpriest receives a letter from Doña Quaresma (Lent) exhorting her officials—more especially archpriests and clerics—to arm for the combat against Don Carnal who symbolises the meat-eating tendencies prevalent during the rest of the year. Then follows an allegorical description of the encounter between Doña Quaresma and Don Carnal who, after a series of disasters, recovers his supremacy, and returns in triumph accompanied by Don Amor (Love). On Easter Sunday Don Amor’s popularity is at its height, and secular priests, laymen, monks, nuns, ladies and gentlemen, sally forth in procession to meet him:—

Dia era muy ssanto dela pascua mayor,

el sol era salydo muy claro e de noble color;

los omes e las aves e toda noble flor,

todos van rresçebir cantando al amor....

Las carreras van llenas de grandes proçesiones,

muchos omes ordenados que otorgan perdones,

los legos segrales con muchos clerisones,

enla proçesion yua el abad de borbones.

ordenes de çisten conlas de sant benjto,

la orden de crus njego con su abat bendjto,

quantas ordenes son nonlas puse en escripto:

‘¡ venite, exultemus!’ cantan en alto grito....

los dela trinjdat conlos frayles del carmen

e los de santa eulalya, por que non se ensanen,

todos manda que digan que canten e que llamen:

‘¡ benedictus qui venjt!’ Responden todos: ‘amen.’

Rejecting the invitations of irreverent monks, priests, knights and nuns, Love lodges with the Archpriest, and sets up his tent close by till next morning, when he leaves for Alcalá. The Archpriest becomes enamoured of a rich young widow, and—later—of a lady whom he saw praying in church on St. Mark’s Day; but his suit is rejected by both, and his baffled agent Trotaconventos recommends him to pay his addresses to a nun. The beldame takes the business in hand, and finds a listener in Doña Garoza who, after much verbal fencing and interchange of fables, asks for a description of her suitor. Thanks to her natural curiosity, we see Juan Ruiz as he presented himself to Trotaconventos’s (that is to say, his own) sharp, unflattering sight, and the portrait is even more precise and realistic than Cervantes’s likeness of himself. Juan Ruiz was tall, long in the trunk, broad-shouldered but spare, with a good-sized head set on a thick neck, dark-haired, sallow-complexioned, wide-mouthed with rather coarse ruddy lips, long-nosed, with black eyebrows far apart overhanging small eyes, with a protruding chest, hairy arms, big-boned wrists, and a neat pair of legs ending in small feet: though given to strutting like a peacock with deliberate gait, he was a man of sound sense, deep-voiced, and a skilled musician:—

Es ligero, valiente, byen mançebo de djas,

sabe los instrumentos e todas juglerias,

doñeador alegre para las çapatas mjas,

tal ome como este, non es en todas crias.

Doña Garoza allows the Archpriest to visit her, makes him acquainted with the charm of Platonic love—lynpio amor—prays for his spiritual welfare, and might have persuaded him to renounce all carnal affections, had she not died within two months of meeting him. Forgetting her virtuous teaching, the Archpriest tries to set afoot an intrigue with a Moorish girl, to whom he sends Trotaconventos with poems; but his luck is out. The Moorish girl is deaf to his entreaties, and Trotaconventos is taken from him by death. Saddened by this loss, and by the thought that many a door which her ingratiating arts had forced open for him will now be closed, he utters a long lament over the transitoriness of mortal life, moralises at large, denounces the inexorable cruelty of death, and at last resigns himself with the reflection that the old wanton, who so nobly did such dirty work, is honourably placed in heaven between two martyrs:—

!ay! mj trota conventos, mj leal verdadera!

muchos te sigujan biua, muerta yazes señera;

¿ado te me han leuado? non cosa çertera;

nunca torna con nueuas quien anda esta carrera.

Cyerto, en parayso estas tu assentada,

con dos martyres deues estar aconpañada,

sienpre en este mundo fuste per dos maridada;

¿quien te me rrebato, vieja par mj sienpre lasrada?

The Archpriest adds an impudent epitaph on Trotaconventos, who is represented as saying that, though her mode of life was censurable, she made many a happy marriage; as begging all who visit her grave to say a Pater Noster for her; and as wishing them in return the conjoint joys of both heavenly and earthly love. After this sally of blasphemous irony comes advice as to the arms which Christians should use against the devil, the world, and the flesh—a tedious exhortation from which the author breaks away to declare that he has always wished everything (including sermons) to be short, and with this he digresses into a panegyric on little women. But another March has come round, and, as usual, in the spring the Archpriest’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. In default of the gifted Trotaconventos, he employs Don Furón, a liar, drunkard, thief, mischief-maker, gambler, bully, glutton, wrangler, blasphemer, fortune-teller, debauchee, trickster, fool and idler: apart from the defects inherent to these fourteen characters, Don Furón is as good a fa tutto as one can hope to have. But he fails in the only embassy on which he is sent, and, with a good-humoured laugh at his own folly, the Archpriest narrates his last misadventure as a lover. With an elaborate exposition of the saintly sentiments which actuated the author (for whom every reader is entreated to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria), the Libro de buen amor ends. What seems to be a supplement contains seven poems addressed to the Virgin (a begging-song for poor students being interpolated between the second and third poem). The Salamanca manuscript closes with an amusingly impertinent composition in which a certain archpriest unnamed—possibly Juan Ruiz himself—is described as being sent by Don Gil Albornoz, the Archbishop of Toledo, with a brief from the Pope inculcating celibacy on the Dean and Chapter of Talavera. What follows has all the air of being a personal experience. The brief is no sooner read in church than the Dean is on his legs, threatening to resign rather than submit; the Treasurer wishes that he could lay hands on the meddling Archbishop, and both the Precentor Sancho and the Canon Don Gonzalo join in an indignant protest against the attempt to curtail clerical privileges. The Gayoso manuscript, which omits this Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera, includes two songs for blind men, and these are printed by M. Ducamin as a sort of last postscript to the Libro de buen amor.

Having analysed the contents of the work, we are now in a better position to form a judgment on the conclusion implied by an incidental question in M. Alfred Jeanroy’s admirable book, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge:—‘Mais qui ne sait que l’œuvre de Hita est une macédoine d’imitations françaises, qui témoignent du reste de la plus grande originalité d’esprit?’ The proposition may be too broadly put, but it is fundamentally true. The Archpriest borrows in all directions. The sources of between twenty and thirty of his fables have been pointed out by Wolf, and may be followed up a little higher in the works of M. Hervieux and Mr. Jacobs. Orientalists no doubt could tell us, if they chose, the origin of the story of King Alcarás and his doomed son:—

Era vn Rey de moros, Alcarás nonbre avia;

nasçiole vn fijo bello, mas de aquel non tenja,

enbjo por sus sabios, dellos saber querria

el signo e la planeta del fijo quel nasçia.

Once at least the Archpriest hits on a subject which also attracted his contemporary the Infante Don Juan Manuel: the Libro de buen amor and the Conde Lucanor both relate the story of the thief who sold his soul to the devil. But the differences between the two men are more marked than the resemblances. The Archpriest has nothing of the Infante’s imposing gravity and cold disdain; his temperament is more exuberant, the note of his humour is more incorrigibly picaresque, and he seeks his subjects further afield. The tale of the pantomimic dispute between the learned Greek and the illiterate Roman is thought by Wolf to derive probably from some mediæval Latin source, and Sr. Puyol y Alonso particularises with the ingenious suggestion that the Archpriest took it from a commentary by Accursius on Pomponius’s text of the Digest (De origine juris, Tit. ii.). Perhaps: but this is just the sort of story that circulated orally in the Middle Ages from one country to another as smoking-room jests float across the Atlantic now, and Ruiz is quite as likely to have picked it up from a tramping tinker, or a tumbler at a booth, as from the famous juridical glossator of the previous century.

We cannot tell who his friends were nor where he went; but the Libro de buen amor shows that he had acquaintances in all classes—especially in the least starched of them—and it would not surprise me to learn that he had wandered as far as Italy or France. Life was brighter, more full of opportunities, for a clerical picaroon in the fourteenth century than it is to-day. Now he would be suspended as a scandal: then the world was all before him where to choose. Of Italian I am not so sure: certainly the Archpriest knew French literature better than we should expect. Observe that the Treasurer of the Talavera Chapter mentions Blanchefleur, Floire and Tristan, and (of course) finds their trials less pathetic than his own and the worthy Teresa’s.