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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
[Illustration]
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
CHAPTER PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. THE ANONYMOUS AGE (1150-1220) 43
III. THE AGE OF ALFONSO THE LEARNED, AND OF SANCHO
(1220-1300) 57
IV. THE DIDACTIC AGE (1301-1400) 74
V. THE AGE OF JUAN II. (1419-1454) 93
VI. THE AGE OF ENRIQUE IV. AND THE CATHOLIC KINGS
(1454-1516) 109
VII. THE AGE OF CARLOS QUINTO (1516-1556) 129
VIII. THE AGE OF FELIPE II. (1556-1598) 165
IX. THE AGE OF LOPE DE VEGA (1598-1621) 211
X. THE AGE OF FELIPE IV. AND CARLOS THE BEWITCHED
(1621-1700) 275
XI. THE AGE OF THE BOURBONS (1700-1808) 343
XII. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 363
XIII. CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE 383
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 399
INDEX 413
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[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).