THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.
LIMITATIONS OF THIS CHAPTER. LATE GREEK ROMANCE. ITS
DIFFICULTIES AS A SUBJECT. ANNA COMNENA, ETC. 'HYSMINIAS AND
HYSMINE.' ITS STYLE. ITS STORY. ITS HANDLING. ITS
"DECADENCE." LATENESS OF ITALIAN. THE "SARACEN" THEORY. THE
"FOLK-SONG" THEORY. CIULLO D'ALCAMO. HEAVY DEBT TO FRANCE.
YET FORM AND SPIRIT BOTH ORIGINAL. LOVE-LYRIC IN DIFFERENT
EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. POSITION OF SPANISH. CATALAN-PROVENÇAL.
GALICIAN-PORTUGUESE. CASTILIAN. BALLADS? THE 'POEMA DEL
CID.' A SPANISH "CHANSON DE GESTE." IN SCHEME AND SPIRIT.
DIFFICULTIES OF ITS PROSODY. BALLAD-METRE THEORY.
IRREGULARITY OF LINE. OTHER POEMS. APOLLONIUS AND MARY OF
EGYPT. BERCEO. ALFONSO EL SABIO.
[Sidenote: _Limitations of this chapter._]
There is something more than a freak, or a mere geographical
adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of
the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in
the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the
present book. The dying literature of Greece--if indeed it be not more
proper to describe this phase of Byzantine writing as ghostly rather
than moribund--presents at most but one point of interest, and that
rather a _Frage_, a thesis, than a solid literary contribution. The
literature of Italy prior to the fourteenth century is such a daughter
of Provençal on the one hand, and is so much more appropriately to be
taken in connection with Dante than by itself on the other, that it
can claim admission only to be, as it were, "laid on the table." And
that of Spain, though full of attraction, had also but just begun, and
yields but one certain work of really high importance, the _Poema del
Cid_, for serious comment in our pages. In the case of Spain, and
still more in that of Italy, the scanty honour apparently paid here
will be amply made up in other volumes of the series. As much can
hardly be said of Greece. Conscientious chroniclers of books may,
indeed, up to the sixteenth century find something which, though
scarcely literature, is at any rate written matter. And at the very
last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to
re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of
Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms
and subjects separated by more than a millennium--by nearly two
millennia--from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek
was once a living speech. But Greek literature, the living literary
contribution of Greek to Europe, almost ceases with the latest poets
of the Anthology.
[Sidenote: _Late Greek romance._]
In what has been called the "ghost" time, however, in that portion of
it which belongs to our present period, there is one shadow that
flutters with a nearer approach to substance than most. Some glance
has been made above at the question, "What was the exact relation
between western romance and that later form of Greek novel-writing of
which the chief relic is the _Hysminias and Hysmine_[180] of
Eustathius Macrembolita?" Were these stories, many of which must be
lost, or have not yet been recovered, direct, and in their measure
original and independent, continuations of the earlier school of Greek
romance proper? Did they in that case, through the Crusades or
otherwise, come under the notice of the West, and serve as stimulants,
if not even directly as patterns, to the far greater achievements of
Western romance itself? Do they, on the other hand, owe something to
models still farther East? Or are they, as has sometimes been hinted,
copies of Western romance itself? Had the still ingenious, though
hopelessly effeminate, Byzantine mind caught up the literary style of
the visitors it feared but could not keep out?
[Footnote 180: Ed. Hercher, _Erotici Scriptores Græci_ (2 vols.,
Leipzig, 1858), ii. 161-286.]
[Sidenote: _Its difficulties as a subject._]
All these questions are questions exceedingly proper to be stated in a
book of this kind; not quite so proper to be worked out in it, even if
the working out were possible. But it is impossible for two
causes--want of room, which might not be fatal; and want of
ascertained fact, which cannot but be so. Despite the vigorous work of
recent generations on all literary and historical subjects, no one has
yet succeeded, and until some one more patient of investigation than
fertile in theory arises, no one is likely to succeed, in laying down
the exact connection between Eastern, Western, and, as go-between,
Byzantine literature. Even in matters which are the proper domain of
history itself, such as those of the Trojan and Alexandrine
Apocryphas, much is still in the vague. In the case of Western
Romance, of the later Greek stories, and of such Eastern matter as,
for instance, the story of Sharkan and that of Zumurrud and her master
in the _Arabian Nights_, the vague rules supreme. There were, perhaps,
_trouvère_-knights in the garrisons of Edessa or of Jôf who could have
told us all about it. But nobody did tell: or if anybody did, the tale
has not survived.
[Sidenote: _Anna Comnena, &c._]
But this interest of problem is not the only one that attaches to the
"drama," as he calls it, of Eustathius or Eumathius "the philosopher,"
who flourished at some time between the twelfth and the fourteenth
century, and is therefore pretty certainly ours. For the purposes of
literary history the book deserves to be taken as the typical
contribution of Greek during the period, much better than the famous
_Alexiad_ of Anna Comnena[181] in history, or the verse romances of
Eustathius's probable contemporaries Theodorus Prodromus and Nicetas
Eugenianus.[182] The princess's book, though historically important,
and by no means disagreeable to read, is, as literature, chiefly
remarkable as exhibiting the ease and the comparative success with
which Greek lent itself to the formation of an artificial _style
noble_, more like the writing of the average (not the better)
Frenchman of the eighteenth century than it is like anything else. It
is this peculiarity which has facilitated the construction of the
literary _pastiche_ called Modern Greek, and perhaps it is this which
will long prevent the production of real literature in that language
or pseudo-language. On the other hand, the books of Theodorus and
Nicetas, devoted, according to rule, to the loves respectively of
Rhodanthe and Dosicles, of Charicles and Drosilla, are written in
iambic trimeters of the very worst and most wooden description. It is
doubtful whether even the great Tragic poets could have made the
trimeter tolerable as the vehicle of a long story. In the hands of
Theodorus and Nicetas its monotony becomes utterly sickening, while
the level of the composition of neither is much above that of a by no
means gifted schoolboy, even if we make full allowance for the changes
in prosody, and especially in quantity, which had set in for Greek as
they had for other languages. The question whether these iambics are
more or less terrible than the "political verses"[183] of the Wise
Manasses,[184] which usually accompany them in editions, and which
were apparently inserted in what must have been the inconceivably
dreary romance of "Aristander and Callithea," must be left to
individual taste to decide. Manasses also wrote a History of the World
in the same rhythm, and it is possible that he may have occasionally
forgotten which of the two books he was writing at any given time.
[Footnote 181: Ed. Reifferscheid. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1884.]
[Footnote 182: Following Eustathius in Hercher, _op. cit._]
[Footnote 183: These political verses are fifteen-syllabled, with a
cæsura at the eighth, and in a rhythm ostensibly accentual.]
[Footnote 184: _Erotici Scriptores_, ii. 555.]
[Sidenote: Hysminias and Hysmine.]
[Sidenote: _Its style._]
But _Hysminias and Hysmine_[185] has interests of character which
distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of
chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine
literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat
featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is
by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always,
perhaps, based on or buttressed by direct acquaintance with the
original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this
interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for
the attraction is one of style. Neither Lyly nor any of our late
nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched,
Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the
simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and
natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic,
and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has
availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue
to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice
to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its
coquetry of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its
jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in
every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to
would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern--the
present tense, the use of catchwords like [Greek: holos], the
repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate
description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to
be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek
novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the
descriptions of _Hysminias and Hysmine_ more mediæval than those of
Achilles, more like the _Romance of the Rose_, to which, indeed, there
is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of
epithet--"a man athirst, and parched, and boiling"--meet us. There is
a frequent economy of conjunctions. There is the resort to
personification--for instance, in the battle of Love and Shame, which
serves as climax to the elaborate description of the lovers' kissing.
In short, all our old friends--the devices which every generation of
seekers after style parades with such a touching conviction that they
are quite new, and which every literary student knows to be as old as
literature--are to be found here. The language is in its decadence:
the writer has not much to say. But it is surprising how much, with
all his drawbacks, he accomplishes.
[Footnote 185: Sometimes spelt _Ismenias and Ismene_. I believe it was
first published in an Italian translation of the late Renaissance, and
it has appeared in other languages since. But it is only worth reading
in its own.]
[Footnote 186: [Greek: Polis Eurykômis kai talla men agathê, hoti kai
thalattê stephanoutai kai poilmois katarreitai kai leimôsi koma kai
tryphais euthêneitai pantodapais, ta d' eis theous eusebês, kai hyper
tas chrysas Athênas holê bômos, holê thyma, theois anathêma.]]
[Sidenote: _Its story._]
Whether the book, either as an individual composition, or more
probably as a member of an extinct class, is as important in matter
and in tone as it is in style is more doubtful. The style itself, as
to which there is no doubt, may perhaps colour the matter too much.
All that can be safely said is that it reads with distinctly modern
effect after Heliodorus and Achilles, Longus and Xenophon. The story
is not much. Hysminias, a beautiful youth of the city of Eurycomis, is
chosen for a religious embassy or _kerukeia_ to the neighbouring town
of Aulicomis. The task of acting as host to him falls on one
Sosthenes, whose daughter Hysmine strikes Hysminias with love at first
sight. The progress of their passion is facilitated by the pretty old
habit of girls acting as cupbearers, and favoured by accident to no
small degree, the details of the courtship being sometimes luscious,
but adjusted to less fearless old fashions than the wooings of Chloe
or of Melitta. Adventures by land and sea follow; and, of course, a
happy ending.
[Sidenote: _Its handling._]
But what is really important is the way in which these things are
handled. It has as mere story-telling little merit: the question is
whether the spirit, the conduct, the details, do not show a temper
much more akin to mediæval than to classical treatment. I think they
do. Hysminias is rather a silly, and more than rather a
chicken-hearted, fellow; his conduct on board ship when his beloved
incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was
countryman _ex hypothesi_ of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The
"battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine
sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not
to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I
cannot read of Hysmine without being reminded of Nicolette, as I am
never reminded in other parts of the _Scriptores Erotici_.
[Sidenote: _Its "decadence."_]
Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but
feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has
more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are
"rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"--the masque of a moribund
art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger
and hopefuller craftsmanship, but the general effect is the same. We
are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which,
though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet
surely exist and reappear at intervals--the contortions of style that
cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary
reminiscence ([Greek: holos] itself in this way is at least as old as
Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "analysis"
of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about
being "_né trop tard dans un monde trop vieux_" has been true of many
persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of
themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of
him.
Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but
be refreshing to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of
Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely
a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate
advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with
those of the past, even had it existed.
[Sidenote: _Lateness of Italian._]
Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature,
however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant
of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a
regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of
Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in
Italy shows very little trace of classical influence[187]: and though
that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding
ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language,
it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In
the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different
influences are perceptible. One of them--the influence of the
literatures of France, both Southern and Northern--is quite certain
and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking
nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and
the development of Provençal literature far anticipated, both in date
and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was
undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh
century. But two other strains--one of which has long been asserted
with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite
subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the
country--are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that
Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and
because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up
to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be,
the fashion to assign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian
literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the
two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse,
common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by
some.
[Footnote 187: I have not thought it proper, considering the system of
excluding mere hypothesis which I have adopted, to give much place
here to that interesting theory of modern "Romanists" which will have
it that Latin classical literature was never much more than a literary
artifice, and that the modern Romance tongues and literatures connect
directly, through that famous _lingua romana rustica_ and earlier
forms of it, vigorous though inarticulate, in classical times
themselves, with primitive poetry--"Saturnian," "Fescennine," and what
not. All this is interesting, and it cannot be said, in the face of
inscriptions, of the scraps of popular speech in the classics, &c., to
be entirely guesswork. But a great deal of it is.]
[Sidenote: _The "Saracen" theory._]
This matter can probably never be pronounced upon, with complete
satisfaction to readers, except by a literary critic who is equally
competent in Eastern and Western history and literature, a person who
certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some
confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen
theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing
of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and
colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and
is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are
known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest
degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is
quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the
juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the
verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the
peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of
that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provençal,
much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact
with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. Anything
more must be regarded as not proven, and not even likely.
[Sidenote: _The "folk-song" theory._]
[Sidenote: _Ciullo d'Alcamo._]
Of late, however, attempts have been made to assign the greater part
of the matter to no foreign influence whatever, but to native
folk-songs, in which at the present time, and no doubt for a long time
back, Italy is beyond all question rich above the wont of European
countries. But this attempt, however interesting and patriotic,
labours under the same fatal difficulties which beset similar attempts
in other languages. It may be regarded as perfectly certain that we do
not possess any Italian popular poem in any form which can have
existed prior to the thirteenth century; and only such poems would be
of any use. To argue, as is always argued in such cases, that existing
examples show, by this or that characteristic, that in other forms
they must have existed in the twelfth century or even earlier, is only
an instance of that learned childishness which unfortunately rules so
widely in literary, though it has been partly expelled from general,
history. "May have been" and "must have been" are phrases of no
account to a sound literary criticism, which insists upon "was." And
in reference to this particular subject of Early Italian Poetry the
reader may be referred to the very learned dissertation[188] of
Signor Alessandro d'Ancona on the _Contrasto_ of Ciullo d'Alcamo,
which has been commonly regarded as the first specimen of Italian
poetry, and has been claimed for the beginning of the thirteenth
century, if not the end of the twelfth. He will, if the gods have made
him in the least critical, rise from the perusal with the pretty clear
notion that whether Ciullo d'Alcamo was "such a person," or whether he
was Cielo dal Camo; whether the _Contrasto_ was written on the bridge
of the twelfth and thirteenth century, or fifty years later; whether
the poet was a warrior of high degree or an obscure folk-singer;
whether his dialect has been Tuscanised or is still Sicilian with
French admixture,--these are things not to be found out, things of
mere opinion and hypothesis, things good to write programmes and
theses on, but only to be touched in the most gingerly manner by sober
history.
[Footnote 188: See _Studj sulla Letteratura Italiana dei Primi
Secoli_. 2d ed. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1891. Pp. 241-458.]
To the critic, then, who deals with Dante--and especially to him,
inasmuch as he has the privilege of dealing with that priceless
document, the _De Vulgari Eloquio_,[189]--may be left Ciullo, or
Cielo, and his successors the Frederician set, from the Emperor
himself and Piero delle Vigne downwards. More especially to him
belong the poets of the late thirteenth century, Dante's own immediate
predecessors, contemporaries, and in a way masters--Guinicelli,
Cavalcanti, Sinibaldi, and Guittone d'Arezzo (to whom the canonical
form of the sonnet used at one time to be attributed, and may be
again); Brunetto Latini, of fiery memory; Fra Jacopone,[190] great in
Latin, eccentric in Italian, and others. It will be not merely
sufficient, but in every way desirable, here to content ourselves with
an account of the general characteristics of this poetry (contemporary
prose, though existent, is of little importance), and to preface this
by some remarks on the general influences and contributions of
material with which Italian literature started.
[Footnote 189: Obtainable in many forms, separately and with Dante's
works. The Latin is easy enough, but there is a good English
translation by A.G. Ferrers Howell (London, 1890). Those who like
facsimiles may find one of the Grenoble MS., with a learned
introduction, edited by MM. Maignien and Prompt (Venice, 1892).]
[Footnote 190: Authorities differ oddly on Jacopone da Todi (_v._ p.
8) in his Italian work. Professor d'Andrea's book, cited above, opens
with an excellent essay on him.]
[Sidenote: _Heavy debt to France._]
There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and
materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a former
chapter, the French _chansons de geste_ made an early and secure
conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation,
partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised
French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to
some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous
member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this
school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provençal
than the Sicilian; and that the special characteristic of the latter
did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a
much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on
popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but
their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was
not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some
centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at
least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Tasso gave it a
new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction.
[Sidenote: _Yet form and spirit both original._]
In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however,
which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was
mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the
sonnet and the _canzone_ is the less surprising because their rivals
were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind.
The _Contrasto_[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of
five lines--three of sixteen syllables, rhymed _a_, and two
hendecasyllabics, rhymed _b_. The rhymes are fairly exact, though
sometimes loose, _o_ and _u_, _e_ and _i_, being permitted to pair.
The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something
in the style of some French _pastourelles_, displays however, with
some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provençal (perhaps we
might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar
mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early
Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the
_Vita Nuova_, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and
speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the
whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This
spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante
himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives
us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the
sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of
achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair
to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same
time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it
from any one, or at least from any single master or group of masters.
The Provençal poets deify passion, and concentrate themselves wholly
upon it; but it is seldom, indeed, that we find the "metaphysical"
touch in the Provençals proper. And it is this--this blending of love
and religion, of scholasticism and _minnedienst_ (to borrow a word
wanted in other languages than that in which it exists)--that is
attributed by the partisans of the East to Arabian influence, or at
least to Arabian contact. Some stress has been laid on the testimony
of Ibn Zobeir about the end of the twelfth century, and consequently
not long before even the latest date assigned to Ciullo, that Alcamo
itself was entirely Mussulman in belief.
[Footnote 191: The text with comment, stanza by stanza, is to be found
in the book cited above.]
[Sidenote: _Love-lyric in different European countries._]
On these points it is not possible to decide: the point on which to
lay the finger for our present purpose is that the contribution of
Italy at this time was, on the one hand, the further refinement of the
Provençal attention to form, and the production of one capital
instrument of European poetry--the sonnet; on the other, the
conveyance, by means of this instrument and others, of a further, and
in one way almost final, variation of the poetic expression of love.
It is of the first importance to note the characteristics, in
different nations at nearly the same time, of this rise of lyrical
love-poetry. We find it in Northern and Southern France, probably at
about the same time; in Germany and Italy somewhat later, and almost
certainly in a state of pupilship to the French. All, in different
ways, display a curious and delightful metrical variety, as if the
poet were trying to express the eternal novelty, combined with the
eternal oneness, of passion by variations of metrical form. In each
language these variations reflect national peculiarities--in Northern
French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate
refrain, in Provençal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but
somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.
And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must,
as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their
identity with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable
love-poems of the _trouvères_, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes
impassioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not
seldom on pure comedy. The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the
troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain
extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side
merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely
fantastic.
Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect,
lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity,
and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting
it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it
at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for
which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a
_corpus_ of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. We should then see--after a fashion difficult if
not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and
often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind--at once
the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the
filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature,
perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating
the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though
it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it
has a double portion of the mediæval defect of "school"-work--of the
almost tedious similarity of different men's manner--the Italian
poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the
thirteenth century would be not the least interesting part of such a
_corpus_.
[Footnote 192: "Sacro erotismo," "baccanale cristiano," are phrases of
Professor d'Andrea's.]
[Sidenote: _Position of Spanish._]
The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably
inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich
in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as
compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at
least one really great composition, the famous _Poema del Cid_, it
ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation,
while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more
interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than
the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real
literary preponderance and chieftainship; or with German as an example
of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect
into great if not wholly original literary prominence; much less with
Icelandic and Provençal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression
of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for
all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provençal, but to
Italian itself as an example of early scholarship in literary form.
But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of
vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is
inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial
separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so
disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the _Poema_,
far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement,
and foretells the masterpieces of the national poetry in a way very
different from any that can be said to be shown in Layamon or the
_Ancren Riwle_, even in the Arthurian romances and the early lyrics.
[Footnote 193: Spanish can scarcely be said to have shared, to an
extent commensurate with its interest, in the benefit of recent study
of the older forms of modern languages. There is, at any rate in
English, and I think elsewhere, still nothing better than Ticknor's
_History of Spanish Literature_ (3 vols., London, 1849, and reprinted
since), in the early part of which he had the invaluable assistance of
the late Don Pascual de Gayangos. Some scattered papers may be found
in _Romania_. Fortunately, almost all the known literary materials for
our period are to be found in Sanchez' _Poesias Castellanas Anteriores
al Siglo XV._, the Paris (1842) reprint of which by Ochoa, with a few
valuable additions, I have used. The _Poema del Cid_ is, except in
this old edition, rather discreditably inaccessible--Vollmöller's
German edition (Halle, 1879), the only modern or critical one, being,
I understand, out of print. It would be a good deed if the Clarendon
Press would furnish students with this, the only rival of _Beowulf_
and the _Chanson de Roland_ in the combination of antiquity and
interest.]
[Sidenote: _Catalan-Provençal._]
The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called
Spanish divides itself into three heads--Provençal-Catalan;
Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely
Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were
linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the _langue
d'oc_. The political circumstances which attended the dying-out of the
Provençal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance
of Provençal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and
Provençal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by
the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of
the persistence of the "Limousin" tongue in Catalonia and (strongly
dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice
need be taken of this division.
[Sidenote: _Galician-Portuguese._]
So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pass by the Galician
dialects which found their perfected literary form later in
Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of
Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating
before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to
an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real
antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate
the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of
this dialect, and of its development later into the language of
Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this
time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.
[Sidenote: _Castilian._]
With Castilian--that is to say, Spanish proper--the case is very
different. It cannot claim any great antiquity: and as is the case
with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by
which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree
surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in
which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is,
of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the
formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking
countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin
ready to his hands. And the exceptional circumstances of Spain,
which, after hardly settling down under the Visigothic conquest, was
whelmed afresh by the Moorish invasion, have not been excessively
insisted upon by the authorities who have dealt with the subject. But
still it cannot but strike us as peculiar that the document--the
famous Charter of Avilés,[194] which plays in the history of Spanish
something like the same part which the Eulalia hymn and the Strasburg
Oaths play in French--dates only from the middle of the twelfth
century, more than three hundred years after the Strasburg
interchange, and at a time when French was not merely a regularly
constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It
is true that the Avilés document is not quite so jargonish as the
Strasburg, but the same mark--the presence of undigested
Latin--appears in both.
[Footnote 194: Extracts of this appear in Ticknor, Appendix A., iii.
352, note.]
It is, however, fair to remember that prose is almost invariably later
than poetry, and that official prose of all periods has a tendency to
the barbarous. If the Avilés charter be genuine, and of its assigned
date, it does not follow that at the very same time poetry of a much
less uncouth character was not being composed in Spanish. And as a
matter of fact we have, independently of the ballads, the great _Poema
del Cid_, which has sometimes been supposed to be of antiquity equal
to this, and which can hardly be more than some fifty years later.
[Sidenote: _Ballads?_]
As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must
be repeated at somewhat greater length. There is no doubt at all that
these ballads (which are well known even to English readers by the
masterly paraphrases of Lockhart) are among the finest of their kind.
They rank with, and perhaps above, the best of the Scottish poems of
the same class. But we have practically, it would seem, no earlier
authority for them than the great _Cancioneros_ of the sixteenth
century. It is, of course, said that the _Cronica General_ (see
_post_), which is three centuries earlier, was in part compiled from
these ballads. But, in the first place, we do not know that this was
the fact, or that the ballads were not compiled from the Chronicles,
or from traditions which the Chronicles embodied. And in the second
place, if the Chronicles were compiled from ballads, we do not know
that these ballads, as pieces of finished literature and apart from
their subjects, were anything at all like the ballads that we possess.
This last consideration--an uncomfortable one, but one which the
critic is bound to urge--at once disposes of, or reduces to a minimum,
the value of the much-vaunted testimony of a Latin poem, said to date
before the middle of the eleventh century, that "Roderic, called _Mio
Cid_," was sung about. No doubt he was; and no doubt, as the
expression _Mio Cid_ is not a translation from the Arabic, but a quite
evidently genuine vernacularity, he was sung of in those terms. But
the testimony leaves us as much in doubt as ever about the age of the
_existing_ Cid ballads. And if this be the case about the Cid ballads,
the subject of which did not die till hard upon the opening of the
twelfth century itself, or about those concerning the Infantes of
Lara, how much more must it be so with those that deal with such
subjects as Bernardo del Carpio and the Charlemagne invasion, three
hundred years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was
nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes
to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports
in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which
nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the
ballads themselves--which, though simple, is by no means of a very
primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular
dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular
structure of Latin--disproves the extreme earliness of the poems in
anything like their present form. The comparatively uncouth, though
not lawless metres of early Teutonic poetry are in themselves warrants
of their antiquity: the regularity, not strait-laced but unmistakable,
of the Spanish ballads is at least a strong suggestion that they are
not very early.
[Sidenote: _The_ Poema del Cid.]
At any rate there is no sort of proof that they _are_ early; and in
this history it has been made a rule to demand proof, or at least the
very strongest probability. If there be any force in the argument at
the end of the last paragraph, it tells (unless, indeed, the latest
critical hypothesis be adopted, of which more presently) as much in
favour of the antiquity of the _Poema del Cid_ as it tells against
that of the ballads. This piece, which has come down to us in a
mutilated condition, though it does not seem likely that its present
length (3744 lines) has been very greatly affected by the mutilations,
has been regarded as dating not earlier than the middle of the twelfth
or later than the middle of the thirteenth century--that is to say, in
the first case, within a lifetime of the events it professes to deal
with; in the second, at scarcely more than two lifetimes from them.
The historical personality of Ruy Diaz de Bivar, el Cid Campeador
(?1040-1099), does not concern us, though it is perfectly well
established in general by the testimony of his enemies, as well as by
that of his countrymen, and is indeed almost unique in history as that
of a national hero at once of history and of romance. The Roderic who
regained what a Roderic had lost may have been--must have been,
indeed--presented with many facts and achievements which he never
performed, and there may be no small admixture of these in the _Poema_
itself; but that does not matter at all to literature. It would not,
strictly speaking, matter to literature if he had never existed. But
not every one can live up to this severe standard in things literary;
and it is undoubtedly a comfort to the natural man to know that the
Cid certainly did exist, and that, to all but certainty, his blood
runs in the veins of the Queen of England and of the Emperor of
Austria, not to mention the King of Spain, to-day.
[Sidenote: _A Spanish_ chanson de geste.]
But in the criticism of his poetical history this is in strictness
irrelevant. It is unlucky for that criticism that Southey and
Ticknor--the two best critics, not merely in English but in any
language, who have dealt with Spanish literature--were quite
unacquainted with the French _chansons de geste_; while of late,
discussion of the _Poema_, as of other early Spanish literature, has
been chiefly abandoned to philologists. No one familiar with these
_chansons_ (the greatest and oldest of which, the _Chanson de Roland_,
was to all but a certainty in existence when Ruy Diaz was in his
cradle, and a hundred years before the _Poema_ was written) can fail
to see in a moment that this latter is itself a _chanson de geste_. It
was written much nearer to the facts than any one of its French
analogues, except those of the Crusading cycle, and it therefore had
at least the chance of sticking much closer to those facts. Nor is
there much doubt that it does. We may give up as many as we please of
its details; we may even, if, not pleasing, we choose to obey the
historians, give up that famous and delightful episode of the Counts
of Carrion, which indeed is not so much an episode as the main subject
of the greater part of the poem. But--partly because of its nearness
to the subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in
the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes
already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical,
characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen
of Corneille--the poem is far more _alive_ than the not less heroic
histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the _Nibelungenlied_,
to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women--there
the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception,
perhaps, of Hagen, shadowy, compared not merely to Rodrigo himself,
but to Bermuez and Muño Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya.
[Sidenote: _In scheme and spirit._]
Still the _chanson_ stamp is unmistakably on it from the very
beginning, where the Cid, like three-fourths of the _chanson_ heroes
themselves, has experienced royal ingratitude, through the vaunts and
the fighting, and the stock phrases (_abaxan las lanzas_ following
_abrazan los escudos_, and the like), to that second marriage
connecting the Cid afresh with royalty, which is almost as common in
the _chansons_ as the initial ingratitude. It would be altogether
astonishing if the _chansons_ had not made their way, when French
literature was making it everywhere, into the country nearest to
France. In face of the _Poema del Cid_, it is quite certain that they
had done so, and that here as elsewhere French literature performed
its vigorous, and in a way self-sacrificing, function of teaching
other nations to do better than their teacher.
[Sidenote: _Difficulties of its prosody._]
When we pass from comparisons of general scheme and spirit to those of
metrical form, the matter presents greater puzzles. As observed above,
the earliest French _chansons_ known to us are written in a strict
syllabic metre, with a regular cæsura, and arranged in distinct though
not uniformly long _laisses_, each tipped with an identical
assonance. Further, it so happens that this very assonance is one of
the best known characteristics of Spanish poetry, which is the only
body of verse except old French to show it in any great volume or
variety. The Spanish ballads are uniformly written in trochaic
octosyllables (capable of reduction or extension to six, seven, or
nine), regularly assonanced in the second and fourth line, but not
necessarily showing either rhyme or assonance in the first and third.
This measure became so popular that the great dramatists adopted it,
and as it thus figures in the two most excellent productions of the
literature, ballad and drama, it has become practically identified in
the general mind with Spanish poetry, and not so very long ago might
have been described by persons, not exactly ignorant, as peculiar to
it.
[Sidenote: _Ballad-metre theory._]
But when we turn to the _Poema del Cid_ we find nothing like this. It
is true that its latest and most learned student, Professor Cornu of
Prague,[195] has, I believe, persuaded himself that he has discovered
the basis of its metre to be the ballad octosyllables, full or
catalectic, arranged as hemistichs of a longer line, and that he has
been able to point out some hundreds of tolerably perfect verses of
the kind. But this hypothesis necessitates our granting that it was
possible for the copyists, or the line of copyists, of the unique MS.
in the vast majority of cases to mistake a measure so simple, so
universally natural, and, as history shows, so peculiarly grateful to
the Spanish ear, and to change it into something quite different.
[Footnote 195: I have not seen Professor Cornu's paper itself, but
only a notice of it by M. G. Paris in _Romania_, xxii. 153, and some
additional annotations by the Professor himself at p. 531 of the same
volume.]
[Sidenote: _Irregularity of line._]
For there is no question but that at first sight, and not at first
sight only, the _Poema del Cid_ seems to be the most irregular
production of its kind that can claim high rank in the poetry of
Europe. It is not merely that it is "rough," as its great northern
congener the _Nibelungenlied_ is usually said to be, or that its lines
vary in length from ten syllables to over twenty, as some lines of
Anglo-Saxon verse do. It is that there is nothing like the regular
cadence of the one, or (at least as yet discovered) the combined
system of accent and alliteration which accounts for the other. Almost
the only single feature which is invariable is the break in the middle
of the line, which is much more than a mere cæsura, and coincides not
merely with the end of a word, but with a distinct stop or at least
pause in sense. Beyond this, except by the rather violent hypothesis
of copyist misdeeds above referred to,[196] nobody has been able to
get further in a generalisation of the metre than that the normal form
is an eight and six (better a seven and seven) "fourteener,"
trochaically cadenced, but admitting contraction and extension with a
liberality elsewhere unparalleled.
[Footnote 196: It is perhaps fair to Professor Cornu to admit some
weight in his argument that where proper names predominate--_i.e._,
where the copyist was least likely to alter--his basis suggests itself
most easily.]
And the ends of the verses are as troublesome as their bodies. Not
only is there no absolute system either of assonance or of rhyme; not
only does the consideration that at a certain stage assonance and
consonance[197] meet and blend help us little; but it is almost or
quite impossible to discern any one system on which the one or the
other, or both, can be thought to have been used. Sometimes, indeed
frequently, something like the French _laisses_ or continuous blocks
of end-sound appear: sometimes the eye feels inclined to see
quatrains--a form, as we shall see, agreeable to early Spain, and very
common in all European nations at this stage of their development. But
it is very seldom that either is clearly demonstrable except in parts,
while neither maintains itself for long. Generally the pages present
the spectacle of an intensely irregular mosaic, or rather
conglomerate, of small blocks of assonance or consonance put together
on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember
that Anglo-Saxon verse--now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked
among the strictest prosodic kinds--was long thought to be as formless
as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which
almost all mediæval literature has had during the last century, it is
certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if
it exists, should not have been discovered, or should have been
discovered only by such an Alexandrine cutting of the knot as the
supposition that the copyist has made "pie" of about seventy per cent
at least of the whole.
[Footnote 197: Some writers very inconveniently, and by a false
transference from "consonant," use "consonance" as if equivalent to
"alliteration." It is much better kept for full rhyme, in which vowels
and consonants both "sound with" each other.]
Still the form, puzzling as it is, is extremely interesting, and very
satisfactory to those who can be content with unsystematic enjoyment.
The recurrent wave-sound which has been noted in the _chansons_ is at
least as noticeable, though less regular, here. Let us, for instance,
open the poem in the double-columned edition of 1842 at random, and
take the passage on the opening, pp. 66, 67, giving the best part of
two hundred lines, from 3491 to 3641. The eye is first struck with the
constant repetition of catch-endings--"Infantes de Carrion," "los del
Campeador"--each of which occurs at a line-end some dozen times in the
two pages. The second and still more striking thing is that almost all
this long stretch of verse, though not in one single _laisse_, is
carried upon an assonance in _o_, either plump (_Infanzon_, _cort_,
_Carrion_, &c.), which continues with a break or two for at least
fifty lines, or with another vowel in double assonance (_taiadores_,
_tendones_, _varones_). But this sequence is broken incomprehensibly
by such end-words as _tomar_; and the length of the lines defies all
classification, though one suspects some confusion of arrangement. For
instance, it is not clear why
"Colada e Tizon que non lidiasen con ellas los del Campeador"
should be printed as one line, and
"Hybalos ver el Rey Alfonso.
Dixieron los del Campeador,"
as two.
If we then turn to the earlier part, that which comes before the
Carrion story, we shall find the irregularity greater still. It is
possible, no doubt, by making rules sufficiently elastic, to devise
some sort of a system for five consecutive lines which end _folgar_,
_comer_, _acordar_, _grandes_, and _pan_; but it will be a system so
exceedingly elastic that it seems a superfluity of trouble to make it.
On a general survey it may, I think, be said that either in double or
single assonance _a_ and _o_ play a much larger part than the other
vowels, whereas in the French analogues there is no predominance of
this kind, or at least nothing like so much. And lastly, to
conclude[198] these rather desultory remarks on a subject which
deserves much more attention than it has yet had, it may be worth
observing that by an odd coincidence the _Poema del Cid_ concludes
with a delusive personal mention very similar to, though even more
precise than, that about "Turoldus" in the _Chanson de Roland_. For it
ends--
"Per Abbat le escribio en el mes de maio
En era de mill e CC ... XLV. años,"
there being, perhaps, something dropped between the second C and the
X. Peter Abbat, however, has been less fortunate than Turoldus, in
that no one, it seems, has asserted his authorship, though he may have
been the copyist-malefactor of theory. And it may perhaps be added
that if MCCXLV. is the correct date, this would correspond to 1207 of
our chronology, the Spanish mediæval era starting thirty-eight years
too early.
[Footnote 198: I have not thought it necessary to give an abstract of
the contents of the poem, because Southey's _Chronicle of the Cid_ is
accessible to everybody, and because no wise man will ever attempt to
do over again what Southey has once done.]
[Sidenote: _Other poems._]
The remaining literature before the end of the thirteenth century
(immediately after that date there is a good deal, but most of it is
imitated from France) may be dismissed more briefly. It is not very
bulky, but it is noteworthy that it is collected in a manner by no
means usual at the time, under two known names, those of Gonzalo
Berceo, priest of St Elianus at Callahorra, and of King Alfonso X. For
the Spanish _Alexander_ of Juan Lorenzo Segura, though written before
1300, is clearly but one of the numerous family of the French and
French-Latin _Alexandreids_ and _Romans d'Alixandre_. And certain
poems on Apollonius of Tyre, St Mary of Egypt, and the Three Kings,
while their date is rather uncertain, are also evidently "school
poems" of the same kind.
[Sidenote: _Apollonius and Mary of Egypt._]
The Spanish Apollonius,[199] however, is noteworthy, because it is
written in a form which is also used by Berceo, and which has
sometimes been thought to be spoken of in the poem itself as _nueva
maestria_. This measure is the old fourteener, which struggles to
appear in the _Cid_, regularly divided into hephthemimers, and now
regularly arranged also in mono-rhymed quatrains. The "Life of St Mary
of Egypt,"[200] on the other hand, is in octosyllabic couplets,
treated with the same freedom that we find in contemporary German
handlings of that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least
eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one
might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provençal
original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose
Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this
"coarse and indecent history"--he might surely have found politer
language for a variant of the Magdalene story, which is beautiful in
itself and has received especial ornament from art--thought it
composed of "meagre monkish verse," and "hardly of importance" except
as a monument of language. I should myself venture--with infinitely
less competence in the particular language, but some knowledge of
other things of the same kind and time--to call it a rather lively and
accomplished performance of its class. The third piece[201] of those
published, not by Sanchez himself, but as an appendix to the Paris
edition, is the _Adoracion de Los Santos Reyes_, a poem shorter than
the _Santa Maria Egipciaca_, but very similar in manner as well as in
subject. I observe that Ticknor, in a note, seems himself to be of the
opinion that these two pieces are not so old as the Apollonius; though
his remarks about "the French _fabliaux_" are not to the point. The
_fabliaux_, it is true, are in octosyllabic verse; but octosyllabic
verse is certainly older than the _fabliaux_, which have nothing to do
with the Lives of the Saints. But he could hardly have known this when
he wrote.
[Footnote 199: Sanchez-Ochoa, _op. cit._, pp. 525-561.]
[Footnote 200: Ibid., pp. 561-576.]
[Footnote 201: Sanchez-Ochoa, _op. cit._, pp. 577-579.]
[Sidenote: _Berceo._]
Berceo, who appears to have written more than thirteen thousand
lines, wrote nothing secular; and though the religious poetry of the
Middle Ages is occasionally of the highest order, yet when it is of
that rank it is almost invariably Latin, not vernacular, while its
vernacular expression, even where not despicable, is apt to be very
much of a piece, and to present very few features of literary as
distinguished from philological interest. Historians have, however,
very properly noted in him the occurrence of a short lyrical fragment
in irregular octosyllabics, each rhymed in couplets and interspersed
after every line with a refrain. The only certain fact of his life
seems to be his ordination as deacon in 1221.
[Sidenote: _Alfonso el Sabio._]
Of King Alfonso the Learned (for he does not seem to have been by any
means very wise) much more is of course known, though the saying about
the blessedness of having no history is not falsified in his case. But
his titular enjoyment of the empire, his difficulties with his sons,
his death, practically dethroned, and the rest, do not concern us: nor
does even his famous and rather wickedly wrested saying (a favourite
with Carlyle) about the creation of the world and the possibility of
improvement therein had the Creator taken advice. Even the far more
deservedly famous _Siete Partidas_, with that _Fuero Juzgo_ in which,
though it was issued in his father's time, he is supposed to have had
a hand, are merely noteworthy here as early, curious, and, especially
in the case of the _Partidas_, excellent specimens of Spanish prose in
its earliest form. He could not have executed these or any great part
of them himself: and the great bulk of the other work attributed to
him must also have been really that of collaborators or secretaries.
The verse part of this is not extensive, consisting of a collection of
_Cantigas_ or hymns, Provençal in style and (to the puzzlement of
historians) Galician rather than Castilian in dialect, and an
alchemical medley of verse and prose called the _Tesoro_. These, if
they be his, he may have written for himself and by himself. But for
his _Astronomical Tables_, a not unimportant _point de repère_ in
astronomical history, he must, as for the legal works already
mentioned and others, have been largely indebted. There seems to be
much doubt about a prose _Trésor_, which is or is not a translation of
the famous work of Brunetto Latini (dates would here seem awkward).
But the _Cronica General de España_, the Spanish Bible, the Universal
History, and the _Gran Conquesta de Ultramar_ (this last a History of
the Crusades, based partly on William of Tyre, partly on the _chanson_
cycle of the Crusades, fables and all) must necessarily be his only in
the sense that he very likely commissioned, and not improbably
assisted in them. The width and variety of the attributions, whether
contestable in parts or not, prove quite sufficiently for our purpose
this fact, that by his time (he died in 1284) literature of nearly all
kinds was being pretty busily cultivated in the Spanish vernaculars,
though in this case as in others it might chiefly occupy itself with
translations or adaptations of Latin or of French.
This fact in general, and the capital and interesting phenomenon of
the _Poema del Cid_ in particular, are the noticeable points in this
division of our subject. It will be observed that Spain is at this
time content, like Goethe's scholar, _sich üben_. Her one great
literary achievement--admirable in some respects, incomparable in
itself--is not a novelty in kind; she has no lessons in form to give,
which, like some of Italy's, have not been improved upon to this day;
she cannot, like Germany, boast a great quantity of work of equal
accomplishment and inspiration; least of all has she the astonishing
fertility and the unceasing _maestria_ of France. But she has practice
and promise, she is doing something more than "going to begin," and
her one great achievement has (it cannot well be too often repeated)
the inestimable and unmistakable quality of being itself and not
something else, in spirit if not in scheme, in character if not quite
in form. It would be no consolation for the loss of the _Cid_ that we
have _Beowulf_ and _Roland_ and the _Nibelungen_--they would not fill
its place, they do not speak with its voice. The much-abused and
nearly meaningless adjective "Homeric" is here, in so far as it has
any meaning, once more appropriate. Of the form of Homer there is
little: of the vigour, the freshness, the poetry, there is much.