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LEGENDS & ROMANCES OF SPAIN
By
LEWIS SPENCE F.R.A.I.
Author of "Legends and Romances of Brittany"
"Hero-Tales and Legends of the Rhine"
"A Dictionary of Medieval Romance and Romance-writers"
Etc. Etc.
London
George G. Harrap & Company Ltd.
2 & 3 Portsmouth Street Kingsway W.C.
and at Sydney
PREFACE
Since the days of Southey the romantic literature of Spain has
not received from English writers and critics the amount of study
and attention it undoubtedly deserves. In no European country did
the seeds of Romance take root so readily or blossom so speedily
and luxuriantly as in Spain, which perhaps left the imprint of its
national character more deeply upon the literature of chivalry than did
France or England. When we think of chivalry, do we not think first of
Spain, of her age-long struggle against the pagan invaders of Europe,
her sensitiveness to all that concerned personal and national honour,
of the names of the Cid Campeador, Gayferos, and Gonzalvo de Cordova,
gigantic shadows in harness, a pantheon of heroes, which the martial
legends of few lands can equal and none surpass. The epic of our
British Arthur, the French chansons de gestes, are indebted almost
as much to folklore as to the imagination of the singers who first
gave them literary shape. But in the romances of Spain we find
that folklore plays an inconsiderable part, and that her chivalric
fictions are either the offspring of historic happenings or of that
brilliant and glowing imagination which illumines the whole expanse
of Peninsular literature.
I have given more space to the proofs of connexion between the French
chansons de gestes and the Spanish cantares de gesta than most of my
predecessors who have written of Castilian romantic story. Indeed,
with the exception of Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly, whose admirable work
in the field of Spanish letters forms so happy an exception to our
national neglect of a great literature, I am aware of no English
writer who has concerned himself with this subject. My own opinion
regarding the almost total lack of Moorish influence upon the Spanish
romanceros is in consonance with that of critics much better qualified
to pass judgment upon such a question. But for my classification of
the ballad I am indebted to no one, and this a long devotion to the
study of ballad literature perhaps entitles me to make. I can claim,
too, that my translations are not mere paraphrases, but provide
renderings of tolerable accuracy.
I have made an earnest endeavour to provide English readers with
a conspectus of Spanish romantic literature as expressed in its
cantares de gesta, its chivalric novels, its romanceros or ballads,
and some of its lighter aspects. The reader will find full accounts and
summaries of all the more important works under each of these heads,
many of which have never before been described in English.
If the perusal of this book leads to the more general study of the
noble and useful Castilian tongue on the part of but a handful of
those who read it, its making will have been justified. The real
brilliance and beauty of these tales lie behind the curtains of a
language unknown to most British people, and can only be liberated
by the spell of study. This book contains merely the poor shadows
and reflected wonders of screened and hidden marvels.
L. S.
Edinburgh
June 1920
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I The Sources of Spanish Romance 11
II The "Cantares de Gesta" and the "Poema del Cid" 48
III "Amadis de Gaul" 90
IV The Sequels to "Amadis de Gaul" 139
V The Palmerin Romances 169
VI Catalonian Romances 187
VII Roderic, Last of the Goths 201
VIII "Calaynos the Moor," "Gayferos," and
"Count Alarcos" 213
IX The Romanceros, or Ballads 222
X The Romanceros, or Ballads--continued 245
XI Moorish Romances of Spain 263
XII Tales of Spanish Magic and Sorcery 333
XIII Humorous Romances of Spain 351
Bibliography 407
CHAPTER I: THE SOURCES OF SPANISH ROMANCE
Romance, Romance, the songs of France,
The gestes of fair Britaine,
The legends of the sword and lance
That grew in Alemaine,
Pale at thy rich inheritance,
Thou splendour of old Spain!
Anon.
If, spent with journeying, a stranger should seat himself in some
garden in old Granada, and from beneath a tenting of citron and
mulberry leaves open his ears to the melody of the waters of the City
of Pomegranates and his spirit to the sorcery of its atmosphere,
he will gladly believe that in the days when its colours were less
mellow and its delicious air perhaps less reposeful the harps of its
poets were the looms upon which the webs of romance were woven. Almost
instinctively he will form the impression that the Spaniard, having
regained this paradise after centuries of exile, and stirred by the
enchanted echoes of Moorish music which still lingered there, was
roused into passionate song in praise of those heroes of his race who
had warred so ceaselessly and sacrificed so much to redeem it. But
if he should climb the Sierra del Sol and pass through the enchanted
chambers of the Alhambra as a child passes through the courts of dream,
he will say in his heart that the men who builded these rooms from the
rainbow and painted these walls from the palette of the sunset raised
also the invisible but not less gorgeous palace of Spanish Romance.
Or if one, walking in the carven shadows of Cordova, think on the
mosque Maqsura, whose doors of Andalusian brass opened to generations
of poets and astrologers, or on the palace of Azzahra, built of
rose and sea-coloured marbles rifled from the Byzantine churches of
Ifrikia, will he not believe that in this city of shattered splendours
and irretrievable spells the passion-flower of Romance burst forth
full-blown?
But we cannot trace the first notes of the forgotten musics nor piece
together the mosaic of broken harmonies in the warm and sounding
cities of the Saracens, neither in "that mine of silk and silver," old
Granada, nor among the marble memories of Cordova, whose market-place
overflowed with the painted parchments of Moorish song and science. We
must turn our backs on the scarlet southern land and ascend to the
bare heights of Castile and Asturias, where Christian Spain, prisoned
for half a thousand years upon a harsh and arid plateau, and wrought
to a high passion of sacrifice and patriotism, burst into a glory of
martial song, the echoes of which resound among its mountains like
ghostly clarions on a field of old encounter.
Isolation and devotion to a national cause are more powerful as
incentives to the making of romance than an atmosphere of Eastern
luxuriance. The breasts of these stern sierras were to give forth
milk sweeter than the wine of Almohaden, and song more moving if less
fantastic arose in Burgos and Carrión than ever inspired the guitars
of Granada. But the unending conflict of Arab and Spaniard brought
with it many interchanges between the sensuous spirit of the South
and the more rugged manliness of the North, so that at last Saracen
gold damascened the steel of Spanish song, and the nets of Eastern
phantasy wound themselves about the Spanish soul. In a later day
an openly avowed admiration for the art and culture of the Moslem
leavened the ancient hate, and the Moorish cavalier imitated the
chivalry, if not the verse, of the Castilian knight. [1]
The Cradle of Spanish Song
The homeland of Spanish tradition was indeed a fitting nursery for the
race which for centuries contested every acre of the Peninsula with
an enemy greatly more advanced in the art of warfare, if inferior in
resolution and the spirit of unity. Among the flinty wastes of the
north of Spain, which are now regarded as rich in mineral resources,
are situated at intervals luxuriant and fertile valleys sunk deep
between the knees of volcanic ridges, the lower slopes of which
are covered with thick forests of oak, chestnut, and pine. These
depressions, sheltered from the sword-like winds which sweep down
from the Pyrenees, reproduce in a measure the pleasant conditions of
the southern land. Although their distance one from another tended
to isolation, it was in these valleys that Christian Spain received
the respite which enabled her to collect her strength and school her
spirit for the great struggle against the Saracen.
In this age-long contest she was undoubtedly inspired by that subtle
sense of nationhood and the possession of a common tongue which have
proved the salvation of many races no less desperately situated, and
perhaps her determination to redeem the lost Eden of the South is the
best measure of the theory that, prior to the era of Saracen conquest,
the Castilian tongue was a mere jargon, composed of the elements of
the Roman lingua rustica and the rude Gothic, and, according to some
authorities, still lacking in grammatical arrangement and fixity
of idiom. [2] It is certainly clear that the final phases in the
evolution of Castilian took place subsequently to the Arabic invasion,
but it is a straining of such scanty evidence as we possess to impute
to the form of Castilian speech current immediately before that time
the character of an undisciplined patois.
Roman and Visigoth
When in the early part of the fifth century the Visigoths, following
in the wake of the Vandal folk, entered Romanized Spain, they did not
build upon the ruins of its civilization, but retained the habits of
their northern homeland and for some generations seem to have been
little impressed with Roman culture. Nor did the Latin speech of the
people they had conquered at first find favour among them, although,
dwelling as they had done on the very flanks of the Empire, they were
certainly not ignorant of it. They found the people of the Peninsula
as little inclined to relinquish the cultivated language in which their
compatriots Martial, Lucan, and Seneca had contributed to the triumphs
of Roman letters. A military autocracy is not usually successful
in imposing its language upon a subject people unless it possesses
the dual advantages of an ascendancy in arms and literary capacity,
and the Visigoths, unable to compete in this latter respect with the
highly civilized colonists of Hispania, fell, with the passing of
the generations, into the easy acceptance of the Roman tongue. Their
illiteracy, however, was not the sole reason for their partial defeat
in the give-and-take of linguistic strife, for, though powerful in
military combination, they were greatly outmatched in numbers. As
invaders they had brought few women with them, and had perforce to
intermarry with native wives, who taught their children the Roman
tongue. The necessary intercourse between conqueror and conquered in
time produced a sort of pidgin-Latin, which stood in much the same
relation to the classic speech of Rome as the trade languages of the
Pacific did to English. [3]
The use of Latin as a literary tongue in that part of Spain where the
Castilian speech was evolved considerably retarded its development
from the condition of a patois to a language proper. Nevertheless it
continued to advance. The processes by which it did so are surprisingly
obscure, but the circumstance of its literary fixity in the early
eleventh century is proof that it must have achieved colloquial
perfection at least before the era of the Moorish invasion. The
Saracen conquest, by forcing it into the bleak north-west, did it
small disservice, for there it had to contend with other dialects
of the Roman tongue, which enriched its vocabulary, and over which,
ultimately, it gained almost complete ascendancy as a literary
language.
The Romance Tongues of Spain
Three Romance or Roman languages were spoken in that portion of
Spain which remained in Christian hands: in Catalonia and Aragon the
Provençal, Catalan, or Limousin; in Asturias, Old Castile, and Leon
the Castilian; and in Galicia the Gallego, whence the Portuguese had
its origin. The Catalan was almost entirely similar to the Provençal or
langue d'oc of Southern France, and the accession of Raymond Berenger,
Count of Barcelona, to the throne of Provence in 1092 united the
Catalonian and Provençal peoples under one common rule. Provençal,
the language of the Troubadours, was of French origin, and bears
evidence of its evolution from the Latin of Provincial Gaul. It
appears to have been brought into Catalonia by those Hispani who
had fled to Provence from Moorish rule, and who gradually drifted
southward again as the more northerly portions of Spain were freed from
Arab aggression. The political connexion of Catalonia with Provence
naturally brought about a similarity of custom as well as of speech,
and indeed we find the people of the Catalan coast and the province
of Aragon deeply imbued with the chivalry and gallantry of the more
northerly home of the Gai Saber.
Throughout the whole Provençal-Catalan [4] tract were held those
romantic courts of love in which the erotic subtleties of its men
and women of song were debated with a seriousness which shows that
the art of love had entered into competition with the forces of law
and religion, and had, indeed, become the real business of life with
the upper classes of the country. Out of this glorification of the
relations of the sexes arose the allied science of chivalry, no less
punctilious or extravagant in its code and spirit. This spirit of
Provençal chivalry gradually found its way into Castile, heightened
and quickened the imagination of its people, and prepared the Spanish
mind for the acceptance and appreciation of Romantic literature. But at
no time was Castilian imagination passively receptive. It subjected
every literary force which invaded it to such a powerful alchemy
of transmutation that in time all foreign elements lost their alien
character and emerged from the crucible of Spanish thought as things
almost wholly Castilian.
The perfection of rhyming verse was undoubtedly accomplished by the
Troubadour poets of Provence and Catalonia, and opened the way for a
lyric poetry which, if it never attained any loftiness of flight or
marked originality of expression, has seldom been surpassed in melody
and finish. But it is remarkable that this extensive body of verse,
if a few political satires be excepted, has but one constant theme--the
exaltation of love. A perusal of the poetry of the pleasant Provençal
tongue pleases the ear and appeals to the musical sense. The melody is
never at fault, and we can count upon the constancy of a pavane-like
stateliness, which proceeds, perhaps, as much from the genius of
the language as from the metrical excellences of its singers. But
the monotonous repetition of amatory sentiment, for the expression
of which the same conceptions and even the same phrases are again
and again compelled to do duty, the artificial spirit which inspires
these uniform cadences, and the lack of real human warmth soon weary
and disappoint the reader, who will gladly resign the entire poetical
kingdom of Provence to the specialist in prosody or the literary
antiquary in exchange for the freer and less formal beauties of a
music better suited to human needs and less obviously designed for
the uses of a literary caste. The poetry of Provence reminds us of
those tapestries in which the scheme is wholly decorative, where
stiff, brocaded flowers occupy regular intervals in the pattern and a
monotonous sameness of colour is the distinctive note. No episode of
the chase nor pastoral scene charms us by its liveliness or reality,
nor do we find the silken hues distributed in a natural and pleasing
manner. [5]
The Provençal and Catalan troubadours had, indeed, a certain influence
upon the fortunes of Castilian poetry and romance, and proofs of their
early intercourse with Castile are numerous. The thirteenth-century
Book of Apollonius, an anonymous poem, is full of Provençalisms, as
is the rather later History of the Crusades. During the persecution
they suffered at the period of the Albigensian wars numbers of them
fled into Spain, where they found a refuge from their intolerant
enemies. Thus Aimeric de Bellinai fled to the Court of Alfonso IX,
[6] and was later at the Court of Alfonso X, as were Montagnagunt and
Folquet de Lunel, as well as Raimond de Tours and Bertrand Carbunel,
who, with Riquier, either dedicated their works to that monarch or
composed elegies on the occasion of his death. King Alfonso himself
wrote verses of a decidedly Provençal cast, and even as late as 1433
the Marquis de Villena, a kinsman of the famous Marquis de Santillana,
whom we shall encounter later, wrote a treatise upon the art of
the Troubadours, [7] which, following the instincts of a pedant,
he desired to see resuscitated in Castile. [8]
The Galician, a Romance language which sprang from the same root as the
Portuguese, is nearly allied to the Castilian. But it is not so rich in
guttural sounds, from which we may be correct in surmising that it has
less of the Teutonic in its composition than the sister tongue. Like
Portuguese, it possesses an abundance of hissing sounds, and a nasal
pronunciation not unlike the French, which was in all probability
introduced by the early establishment of a Burgundian dynasty upon
the throne. But Galician influence upon Castilian literature ceased
at an early period, although the reverse was by no means the case.
The Rise of Castilian
The evolution of Castilian from the original Latin spoken by the Roman
colonists in Spain was complicated by many local circumstances. Thus
in contracting the vocables of the Roman tongue it did not omit the
same syllables as the Italian, nor did it give such brevity to them
as Provençal or Galician. Probably because of the greater admixture
of Gothic blood among those who spoke it, it is rich in aspirates, and
has a stronger framework than almost any of the Romance tongues. Thus
the Latin f is in Castilian frequently altered to h, as hablar =
fabulari, 'to speak.' The letter j, which is strongly aspirated, is
frequently substituted for the liquid l, so that filius, 'a son,'
becomes hijo. Liquid ll in its turn takes the place of Latin pl,
and we find Latin planus, 'smooth,' appearing in Castilian as llano
(pron. lyáh-no). The Spanish ch supplies the place of the Latin ct,
as facto = hecho, dictu = dicho, and so on.
Other proofs of Teutonic association are not lacking. Thus the g
before c and i, which in Gothic and German is a guttural, has the
same character in Castilian. The Spanish conversion of o into ue also
resembles the similar change in German, if, for example, we compare
Castilian cuerpo and pueblo with the German Körper and Pöbel.
Southward Spread of Castilian
The rise of Castilian as a colloquial and literary tongue was achieved
by the ceaseless struggle of the hardy race who spoke it against the
Saracen occupation of their native land. As the Castilian warriors by
generations of hard fighting gradually regained city after city and
district by district rather than province by province, their language
encroached by degrees upon the area of that of their Arab enemies,
[9] until at length the last stronghold of the Moors fell and left
them not a foothold in the Peninsula. "It was indeed a rude training
which our forefathers, mighty and hardy, had as a prelude to so many
glories and to the conquest of the world," says Martinez in his novel
Isabel de Solis. [10] "Weighed down by their harness and with sword
in hand, they slept at ease no single night for eight centuries."
From the period of the defeat of Roderic, "last of the Visigoths,"
at the battle of Xerez de la Frontera in 711 until the fall of Granada
in 1492, Spain was indeed a land of battles. Almost immediately after
their first defeat by Arab arms the armies of the Visigoths were
pursued to the north-western limits of the Peninsula, where they,
found a rallying-place in the mountains of Biscay and Asturias. There,
like the Welsh after the Saxon invasion of Britain, they might have
become reconciled to the comparatively narrow area left to them,
but the circumstances of their virtual imprisonment served only to
unite them more closely in a common nationality and a common resolve
to win back their original possessions.
For many generations their efforts were confined to border forays
and guerrilla fighting, in which they were by no means uniformly
successful, for the fiery courage of the Saracens would permit of no
mere defensive policy, and nearly every victory of which the Castilians
could boast was counterbalanced by reverses and losses which their
inferior numbers could ill sustain. But by degrees their valorous
obstinacy was rewarded, and ere a century had passed they had regained
the greater part of Old Castile. The very name of this province,
meaning as it does 'the Land of Castles,' shows that even when regained
it was held only by fortifying its every hill-top with strongholds,
so that at last this castellated tract gave its name to the race
which held it so dearly. Before another twenty years had passed the
Castilian warriors had established a footing in New Castile, and from
this time onward seem to have been assured of ultimate success.
The fall of Toledo in 1085, after three centuries and a half of
Saracen occupation, marked a further epoch in the southern advance of
the Castilians, and by the taking of Saragossa in 1118 the tables were
turned upon the Arab invaders, who were now driven into a more confined
part of the country, to the south and south-west. This circumstance,
however, seems to have consolidated rather than crippled their
resisting powers, and they had yet to be reckoned with for nearly four
centuries ere, with the fall of Granada, Boabdil, or Abu-Abdallah, the
last of the Moorish kings, gave up its keys to Ferdinand of Castile,
looked his last upon the city, and crossed to Africa to fling away
his life in battle.
In these circumstances of constant strife and unrest the Romantic
literature of Spain was born. It is by no means remarkable that its
development coincided with the clash of arms. Trumpets re-echo in its
every close. As it expresses the spirit of a martial race, it was also
the nursling of necessity, for from the songs and fables of mighty
heroes the knights of Castile drew a new courage and experienced an
emulous exhilaration which nerved them on the day of battle. Well
might the wandering knight of Castile chant, as in the old ballad:
Oh, harness is my only wear,
The battle is my play:
My pallet is the desert bare,
My lamp yon planet's ray. [11]
Border warfare, with its frequent change of scene and constant alarms,
was a fitting introduction to errantry.
The Literary Development of Castilian
Castilian, although more than one alien influence impinged upon it,
evolved a literary shape peculiarly its own, especially as regards
its verse, as will be seen when we come to deal separately with
its several Romantic forms. Thus it owed nothing to the literary
methods of Provençal or Catalan, though much to their spirit and
outward manners. When the courtly and rather pedantic poetic system
of the Troubadours encountered the grave and vigorous Castilian, it
was ill fitted to make any prolonged resistance. As political causes
had hastened their encounter, so they quickened the victory of the
Castilian. The ruling power in Aragon had from an early period been
connected with Castilian royalty, and Ferdinand the Just, who came
to the throne of Aragon in 1412, was a Castilian prince. The Courts
of Valencia and Burgos were, therefore, practically open to the same
political influences. If our conclusions are correct, it was during
the reigns of Ferdinand the Just and Alfonso V (1412-58) that the
influence of Castilian first invaded the sphere of Catalan. We find
it definitely recognized as a poetic tongue on the occasion of a
contest of song in honour of the Madonna held at Valencia in 1474,
the forty poems sung at which were afterward collected in the first
book printed in Spain. Four of these are in the Castilian tongue,
which was thus evidently regarded as a literary medium sufficiently
developed to be represented at such a contest. Valencia, indeed,
at first wholly Catalan in speech and art, seems to have possessed
a school of Castilian poets of its own from 1470 to 1550, who did
much to popularize their adopted tongue. But the Catalonians were
not minded that their language should lose the literary hegemony
of Spain so easily, and they made every endeavour to sustain it by
instituting colleges of professional troubadours and vaunting its
beauties at their great public contests of song. It was in vain. They
had encountered a language more vigorous, more ample in vocabulary,
more rich in idiomatic construction, and backed by a stronger political
power than their own.
The Poetical Courts of Castile
The evolution of Castilian as a literary language was also
assiduously fostered by the scholarly character of many of the rulers
of Castile. Alfonso the Wise was himself a poet, and cultivated his
native tongue with judiciousness and care, affording it purity and
precision of expression. Under his supervision the Scriptures were
translated into Castilian, and a General Chronicle of Spain as well as
a history of the First Crusade were undertaken at his instance. He made
it the language of the law-courts, and attempted to infuse into its
verse a more exact spirit and poetical phraseology by the imitation
of Provençal models.
Alfonso XI composed a General Chronicle in the easy, flowing rhyme of
the native redondillas, instead of the stiff, monkish Alexandrines
then current in literary circles, and caused books to be written
in Castilian prose on the art of hunting and the genealogy of the
nobility. [12] His relative Don Juan Manuel did much to discipline
Spanish imagination and give fixity to Spanish prose in his Conde
Lucanor, [13] a volume of ethical and political maxims, the morals
of which are well pointed by tales and fables drawn from history and
classical literature. Juan II, [14] although a weak and idle monarch,
was a great patron of letters, wrote verses, associated with poets,
and caused a large collection of the best existing Spanish verse to
be made in 1449. But the spirit of his Court was a pedantic one; it
strayed after Italian models, and he himself affected the Provençal
manner. Despite such artificial barriers, however, Castilian speech
continued to advance upon its conquering way. It had definitely become
the language of Romance, and Romance, within a generation of this
period, was to become the most powerful literary form in the Peninsula.
The Rise of Romance
The development of Romance in Spain, its evolution and the phases
through which it passed, has not, as a theme, met with that painstaking
treatment at the hands of English writers on Spanish literature
that might have been expected at this late day, when the literary
specialist has to search diligently into the remotest corners of
the earth if he seek new treasures to assay. Its several phases are
rather hinted at than definitely laid down, not because of the poverty
or dubiety of the evidential material so much as through the laxity
and want of thoroughness which characterize most Britannic efforts
at epochal fixation or attempts to elucidate the connexion between
successive literary phases. I can scarcely hope to succeed in a task
which other and better equipped authorities have neglected, perhaps
for sound reasons. But I had rather fail in an attempt to reduce the
details of the evolution of Spanish Romance to orderly sequence than
place before the reader an array of unrelated facts and isolated tags
of evidence which, however interesting, present no definite picture,
permit of no reasonable deduction, and are usually accompanied by a
theoretical peradventure or so by way of dubious enlightenment.
If we regard the literary map of Europe from the eleventh to
the thirteenth century we behold the light shining from two
quarters--Jewish-Arabic Spain and France. With the first we have,
at the moment, no concern. Its literature was at the time alien and
inimical to Christian Spain, which, as we shall see later, did not
regard anything Saracen with complacence until its sword crossed no
longer with the scimitar. But in France Castile had an illustrious
exemplar, whose lessons it construed in its own peculiar manner--a
manner dictated both by national pride and political necessity.
With the influence of Southern France we have already dealt. At the
era alluded to, Northern France, the country of the langue d'oïl,
although in a measure disturbed by unrest, was yet in a much better
case to produce great literature than Castile, whose constant vendetta
with the Moslem left her best minds only a margin of leisure for the
production of pure literature--a margin, however, of which the fullest
advantage was taken. The rise of a caste of itinerary poets in France
supplied the popular demand for story-telling, and the trouvères of
the twelfth century recognized in the glorious era of Charlemagne a
fitting and abundant source for heroic fiction such as would appeal
to medieval audiences. The poems, or rather epics, which they based
upon the history of the Carlovingian period were known as chansons de
gestes, 'songs of the deeds' of the great Frankish emperor and his
invincible paladins, or, to the trouvères themselves, as matière de
France, as the Arthurian tales were designated matière de Bretagne,
and those based upon classical history matière de Rome.
Until comparatively recent times these immense works, many of which
comprise six or seven thousand lines of verse, were practically
unknown, even to the generality of literary authorities. [15] As
we now possess them they are comparatively late in form, and have
undergone much revisal, probably for the worse. But they are the
oldest examples of elaborate verse in any modern language, with the
exception of English and Norse, and undoubtedly stand in an ancestral
relation to all modern European literature.
These chansons were intended to be sung in the common halls of feudal
dwellings by the itinerant trouvères, who composed or passed them
on to one another. Their subject-matter deals more with the clash of
arms than the human emotions, though these are at intervals depicted
in a masterly manner. The older examples among them are written in
batches of lines, varying from one to several score, each of which
derives unity from an assonant vowel-rhyme, and known as laisses or
tirades. Later, however, rhyme crept into the chansons, the entire
laisse, or batch, ending in a single rhyme-sound.
Castilian Opposition to the Chansons de Gestes
In these poems, which probably originated in the north of France,
the genre spreading southward as time progressed, Charlemagne is
represented as the great bulwark of Christianity against the Saracens
of Spain. Surrounded by his peers, Roland, Oliver, Naymes, Ogier,
and William of Orange, he wages constant warfare against the Moors
or the 'Saracens' (pagans) of Saxony. Of these poems Gautier has
published a list of one hundred and ten, a moiety of which date from
the twelfth century. A number of the later chansons are in Provençal,
but all attempts to refer the entire cycle in its original condition
to that literature have signally failed.
That this immense body of romantic material found its way into
Castile is positively certain. Whether it did so by way of Provence
and Catalonia is not clear, but it is not impossible that such was the
case. It might be thought that Christian Spain, in the throes of her
struggle with the Moors, took kindly to a literature so constant in its
reference to the discomfiture of her hereditary foes. At first she did
so, and certainly accepted the chanson form. But two barriers to her
undivided appreciation of it presently appeared. In the first place,
the Castilian of the twelfth century seems to have been aware that
if Charlemagne invaded Spain at all, he encountered not only the Moor
but the Spaniard as well. This is not borne out, as some authorities
imply, by a piece in the popular poetry of the Basques known as the
Altobiskarko Cantar, or Song of Altobiskar, which tacitly asserts that
the defeat of Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles was due not to
Saracens, but to Basques, who resented the passage of the Frankish
army through their mountain passes. The whole piece is an effusion
written in Basque by a Basque student named Duhalde, who translated
it from the French of François Garay de Montglave (c. 1833). [16]
A second battle of Roncesvalles took place in the reign of Louis le
Debonair in 824, when two Frankish counts returning from Spain were
again surprised and defeated by the Pyrenean mountaineers. But there
appears to have been a still earlier battle between Franks and Basques
in the Pyrenees in the reign of Dagobert I (631-638). The folk-memory
of these contests seems to have been kept alive, so that the Spaniard
felt that the Frank was somewhat of a traditional enemy. Archbishop
Roderic of Toledo inveighed against those Spanish juglares who sang
the battles of Charlemagne in Spain, and Alfonso the Learned belittles
the mythical successes of the Frankish emperor.
But this was not all. The idea that Charlemagne had entered Spain
as a conqueror, carrying all before him, was offensive to the highly
wrought pride and patriotism of the Castilians, who chose to interpret
the spirit of the chansons de gestes in their own way, and, instead
of copying them slavishly, raised an opposing body of song to their
detriment. Accepting as the national hero of the Carlovingian era an
imaginary knight, Bernaldo de Carpio, they hailed him as the champion
of Castile, and invented songs of their own in which he is spoken
of as slaying and defeating Roland at Roncesvalles at the head of a
victorious army composed not of Arabs or Basques, but Castilians.
The Cantares de Gesta
But if the Castilians did not accept the matter of the chansons, they
assuredly adopted their form. Their literary revolt against the alien
spirit and politics of the chansons seems to have taken place at some
time soon after the diffusion of these throughout Spain. A Spanish
priest of the early twelfth century wrote the fabulous chronicle
of Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, which purported to be the work of
that warlike cleric, but in reality was intended to popularize the
pilgrimage to Compostella to which it had reference. Many Franks
travelled to the shrine, among them trouvères, who in all likelihood
passed on to the native Castilian singers the spirit and metrical
system of the chansons, so that later we hear of Spanish cantares de
gesta, most of which, however, unlike their French models, are lost
to us. The famous Poema del Cid, dealing with the exploits of a great
Castilian hero, is nothing but a cantar de gesta in form and spirit,
and we possess good evidence that many of the late romanceros or
ballads upon such heroes as Bernaldo de Carpio, Gonzalvo de Cordova,
and Gayferos are but ancient cantares 'rubbed down,' or in a state
of attrition.
As in France, so in Spain, degeneration overtook the cantares de
gesta. In course of time they were forced into the market-place and
the scullions' hall. Many of them were worked into the substance of
chronicles and histories; but the juglares who now sang them altered
them, when they passed out of fashion, into corrupt abridgments,
or broke them up into ballads to suit the taste of a more popular
audience. [17]
The Chronicles
But if the majority of the cantares de gesta are irreplaceable as
regards their original form, we find fragments of them in the ancient
chronicles of Spain. Thus the General Chronicle of Spain (c. 1252),
which, according to the latest research, is believed to have undergone
at least three specific alterations or rearrangements of its text,
tells the stories of Bernaldo de Carpio, Fernán González, and the
seven Children of Lara, and provides sketches of Charlemagne, while
its latter portion recounts the history of the Cid, and at times
even appeals to the cantares as its authority for such and such an
episode. Many of the passages in the chronicles, too, are obviously
copied in their entirety from certain cantares. So strongly, indeed,
do they retain the assonant verse-formation typical of the cantares
that many of the later balladeers seem easily to have cast them into
verse again, especially those relating to Bernaldo de Carpio and the
Infantes de Lara, and in this manner they appeared once more in the
cancioneros, or collections of folk-songs.
The Ballads
The immortal ballads of Spain have been the subject of the sharpest
controversy, and their importance as Romantic material demands
special treatment in a separate chapter. Regarding the period
to which they belong and their relations to the larger narrative
poems and chronicles, we must deal briefly with them here. Some
authorities ascribe them to an early age and insist upon their
priority to such poems as the Poema del Cid and such chronicles as
that of Alfonso the Learned, while others are equally assured of
the late date of the greater number. It seems to me that the truth
resides in both hypotheses, and that in this case, as frequently
in literary navigation, it is wise to steer a middle course. In my
view the ballads of Spain are of four fundamental types: those which
arose spontaneously in Northern Spain at some time subsequent to
the formation of the Castilian language, and which, if we possess
any remnants of them at all, have probably come down to us in such
a form as would render them unrecognizable to those who first sang
them; ballads which are based on passages in cantares de gesta as
chronicles; folk-ballads of a later date, more or less altered; and,
lastly, the more modern productions of conscious art.
I also believe that the ballads or romanceros are again of two broad
classes: those of spontaneous folk-origin, owing nothing to literary
sources, and those which are mainly cantares de gesta, or chronicle
passages in a lyric state of attrition. With the great body of
authorities upon ancient Spanish literature I do not believe that the
cantares or chronicles owe anything to the ballads of any age, which
seem to me wholly of popular origin. Of course the two classes lastly
indicated do not include the more 'poetic' or sophisticated ballads
written after the ballad became an accepted form for experiments
in conscious versification, and it is plain that such efforts could
belong to neither category.
No definite proof exists as to the degree of sophistication and
alteration which the ballads underwent before their ultimate collection
and publication. It would be strange, however, if no ballads of
relatively early date had reached us, altered or otherwise, and it
seems to me merely a piece of critical affectation to deny antiquity
to a song solely because it found its way into print at a late period,
or because it is not encountered in ancient MSS., just as it would be
to throw doubt upon the antiquity of a legend or folk-custom current
in our own day--unless; indeed, such should display obvious marks of
recent manufacture. At the same time few of these ballads seem to
me to bear the stamp of an antiquity more hoary than, for example,
those of Scotland or Denmark.
Few of the ballad systems of Europe are better worthy of study than
that of Spain. But in this place we are considering it merely from
the point of view of its bearings upon Romance. That it has a close
affinity with the Romantic literature of the Peninsula is evident
from the name given to these poems by the Spaniards, who call them
romanceros. [18] Some of them are, indeed, romances or cantares de
gesta in little, and in fact they deal with all the great subjects
sung of in the cantares or prosed upon in the chronicles, such as the
Cid, Bernaldo de Carpio, Count Alarcos, and so forth. But they seem to
have little in common with the later romances proper, such as Amadis,
Palmerin, or Felixmarte, for the good reason that by the time these
were in fashion the ballad had become the sole property of the common
people. As the Marquis de Santillana (1398-1458), himself a poet
of note, remarks in a letter famous for the light it throws on the
condition of Spanish literature in his day: "There are contemptible
poets who, without order, rule, or rhythm, make those songs and
romances in which vulgar folk and menials take delight." So might
Lovelace or Drummond of Hawthornden have written of our own balladeers.
The ballads thus relegated to the peasantry and lower classes, those of
the upper classes who found time for reading were accordingly thrown
back upon the chronicles and the few cantares de gesta which had been
reduced to writing. But on the destruction of the Moorish states in
Spain the increase in wealth and leisure among the upper classes,
and the introduction of printing, aroused a demand for books which
would provide amusement. A great spirit of invention was abroad. At
first it resuscitated the Romantic matter lying embedded and almost
fossilized in the chronicles. It is, indeed, but a step from some
of these to the romances proper. But Spain hungrily craved novelty,
and the eyes of romance-makers were turned once more to France, whose
fictional wealth began to be exploited by Spanish writers about the
beginning of the fifteenth century.
The Heyday of Romance
Perhaps the first literary notice that we possess of the romance
proper in Spain is that by Ayala, Chancellor of Castile (d. 1407), who,
in his Rimado de Palacio, deplores the time he has wasted in reading
such "lying stuff" as Amadis de Gaul. He might have been much worse
occupied, but, be that as it may, in his dictum we scarcely have a
forecast of the manner in which this especial type of romance was to
seize so mightily upon the Castilian imagination, which, instead of
being content with mere servile copying from French models, was to
re-endow them with a spirit and genius peculiarly Spanish. Perhaps
in no other European country did the seed of Romance find a soil so
fitting for its germination and fruition, and certainly nowhere did
it blossom and burgeon in such an almost tropical luxuriance of fruit
and flower.
Amadis had for sequel a long line of similar tales, all of which the
reader will encounter later in these pages. By general consent of
critics, from Cervantes onward, it is the best and most distinctive
of the Spanish romances, and was translated into French, Italian, and
indeed into most European languages, [19] a special translation, it
is said, even being made for Jewish readers. At a stroke Peninsular
romanticism had beaten French chivalric fiction upon its own
ground. But Amadis was not, as Cervantes seems to think, the first
book of chivalry printed in Spain, for this distinction belongs to
Tirante the White (1490) which, according to Southey, is lacking in
the spirit of chivalry. [20] Among other figures it introduces that
of Warwick the King-maker, who successfully withstands an invasion
of England by the King of the Canary Islands, and ultimately slays
the invader single-handed and routs his forces. But if Cervantes
errs in his bibliography, his barber's summing-up of Amadis as "the
best of all books of its kind that has been written" is not far from
the truth. [21] Tasso thought it "the most beautiful and perhaps the
most profitable story of its kind that can be read." Did he merely
follow the tonsorial critic's opinion, as his language would tempt
one to believe?
Amadis was followed by a host of imitations. Its enormous success,
from a popular point of view, brought into being a whole literature
of similar stamp and intention, if not of equal quality. The first of
such efforts, in consequence if not in chronology, is that of Palmerin
de Oliva, the earliest known edition of which appeared at Seville in
1525, and was followed, like the Amadis, by similar continuations,
Primaleón, Platir, and Palmerin of England, perhaps the best of the
series. [22] Regarding the alleged Portuguese origin of Amadis and
Palmerin I have more to say elsewhere, and will content myself here by
observing that no Portuguese original, printed or manuscript, exists,
although the priority of such seems undoubted. But these romances
became as Castilian as the Arthurian series became English, despite the
latter's Brythonic or other origin, and Spanish they have remained in
the belief and imagination of all Europe, popular as well as critical.
The Palmerin series only fed and increased the passion for romantic
fiction, so hungry was Spain for a literary diet which seemed so
natural and acceptable to her appetite that those who sought to
provide her with romantic reading could scarce cope with the call
for it. The natural result ensued. A perfect torrent of hastily
written and inferior fiction descended upon the public. Invention,
at first bold, became shameless, and in such absurdities of distorted
imagination as Belianis of Greece, Olivante de Laura, and Felixmarte
of Hyrcania the summit of romantic extravagance was reached. But
ridiculous and insulting to human intelligence and decent taste as
most of these productions were, still they found countless thousands
of readers, and there is every indication that publishing in the
Spain of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries must have
been extremely lucrative. These preposterous and chimerical tales,
lacking the beauty and true imaginative skill and simplicity of the
older romances, stood in much the same relation to them as a host
of imitative novels published in the early years of the nineteenth
century did to the romances of Scott. Mexia, the sarcastic historian of
Charles V, writing of romance in 1545, deplores the public credulity
which battened on such feeble stuff. "For," he says, "there be men
who think all these things really happened, just as they read or hear
them, though the greater part of the things themselves are absurd." So
might a critic of our own day descant upon the popular predilection
for the cheap novel, or the whole desert of sensation-fodder which
pours from the all too rapid machines of the Fiction Trusts.
Still another extravagant and more unpleasant manifestation of
the popular craze for romance arose in such religious tales as
The Celestial Chivalry, The Knight of the Bright Star, and others
of little worth, in which Biblical characters are endowed with the
attributes of chivalry and go on adventure bound. The time occupied
by the appearance of these varying types, and indeed in the whole
latter-day evolution of Spanish romance, was strikingly brief. But
half a century elapsed between the publication of Amadis and the
most extreme of its worthless imitations. But it is not difficult to
account for the rapid manufacture and dissemination of such a mass
of literature, good and bad, when we recall that Spain had been for
ages the land of active knighthood, that her imagination had been
wrought to a high pitch of fervour in her long struggle with her pagan
enemies, and that in the tales of chivalry she now gazed upon with
such admiration she saw the reflection of her own courtly and heroic
spirit--the most sensitive and most fantastically chivalrous in Europe.
Possible Moorish Influence on Spanish Romance
There is indeed evidence--pressed down and flowing over--that the
age-long death-grapple with the Saracen powerfully affected Spanish
romantic fiction. But was this influence a direct one, arising out of
the contiguity and constant perusal of the body of Moorish fiction,
or did it proceed from the atmosphere of wonder which the Saracen left
behind him in Spain, the illusions of which were mightily assisted by
the marvels of his architecture and his art? One can scarcely find
a Spanish romance that is not rich in reference to the Moor, who is
usually alluded to as a caballero and a worthy foe. But is it the real
Moor whom we encounter in these tall folios, which beside our modern
volumes seem as stately galleons might in the company of ocean-going
tramps, or is it the Saracen of romance, an Oriental of fiction,
like the Turk of Byronic literature? The question of the influence
of Moorish literature upon Spanish romance has been shrouded by the
most unfortunate popular misconceptions. Let us briefly examine the
spirit of Arabic literary invention, and see in how far it was capable
of influencing Castilian art and imagination.
The history of the development of the Arabic language from the dialect
of a wandering desert people to a tongue the poetic possibilities and
colloquial uses of which are perhaps unrivalled is in itself sufficient
to furnish a whole volume of romantic episode. The form in which it
was introduced into Spain in the early eighth century can scarcely
fail to arouse the admiration of the lover of literary perfection. As
a literary medium its development was rapid and effective. It is,
indeed, as if the tones of a harsh trumpet had by degrees become
merged into those of a silver clarion whose notes ring out ever more
clearly, until at length they arrive at a keenness so intense as to
become almost intolerably piercing. This eloquent language, the true
speech of the literary aristocrat, has through the difficulty of its
acquirement and the bewildering nature of its written characters
remained almost unknown to the great mass of Europeans--unknown,
too, because the process of translation is inadequate to the proper
conveyance of its finer shades and subtler intimations. Even to the
greater number of the Arabs of Spain the highly polished verse in
which their literature was so rich was unknown. How much more, then,
was it a force removed from the Castilian or the Catalan?
Arabic Poetry
The desert life of the Arabs while they were yet an uncultured people,
although it did not permit of the development of a high standard of
literary achievement, fostered the growth of a spirit of observation so
keen as to result in the creation of a wealth of synonyms, by means of
which the language became greatly enriched. Synonymous meaning and the
discovery of beautiful and striking comparisons are the very pillars
of poetry, and within a century of the era of Moslem ascendancy in
the East we find the brilliant dynasty of the Abbassides (c. A.D. 750)
the generous patrons of a poetic literature which the language was so
well prepared to express. Story-telling had been a favourite amusement
among the Arabs of the desert, and they now found the time-honoured,
spontaneous exercise of the imaginative faculty stand them in good
stead. The rapidity of the progress of Arabic literature at this
period is, indeed, difficult of realization. Poetry, which we are
now assured has 'no market value,' was to the truly enlightened upper
classes of this people an art of the first importance, more precious
than those bales of the silks of Damascus, those gems of Samarkand,
or those perfumes of Syria the frequent allusion to which in their
legends encrusts them, like the walls of the cavern of Ala-ed-din,
with fairy jewels. But words were jewels to the Arab. When Al-Mamoun,
the son of Haroun-al-Raschid, dictated terms of peace to the Greek
emperor Michael the Stammerer, the tribute which he demanded from his
conquered enemy was a collection of manuscripts of the most famous
Greek authors. A fitting indemnity to be demanded by the prince of
a nation of poets!
But conquered Spain was more especially the seat and centre of
Arabian literature and learning. Cordova, Granada, Seville--indeed,
all the cities of the Peninsula occupied by the Saracens--rivalled
one another in the celebrity of their schools and colleges, their
libraries, and other places of resort for the scholar and man of
letters. The seventy libraries of Moorish Spain which flourished
in the twelfth century put to shame the dark ignorance of Europe,
which in time rather from the Arab than from fallen Rome won back its
enlightenment. Arabic became not only the literary but the colloquial
tongue of thousands of Spaniards who dwelt in the south under Moorish
rule. Even the canons of the Church were translated into Arabic,
about the middle of the eighth century, for the use of those numerous
Christians who knew no other language. The colleges and universities
founded by Abderahman and his successors were frequented by crowds
of European scholars. Thus the learning and the philosophy if not the
poetry of the Saracens were enabled to lay their imprint deeply upon
plastic Europe. If, however, we inquire more closely into the local
origins of this surprising enlightenment, we shall find it owing even
more to the native Jews of Spain than to the Moors themselves.
The phase of Arabian culture with which we are most nearly concerned
is its poetic achievement, and the ultimate influence which it brought
to bear upon Spanish literary composition. The poetry of this richly
endowed and imaginative people had at the period of their entrance
into Spain arrived, perhaps, at the apogee of splendour. Its warm
and luxuriant genius was wholly antagonistic to the more restrained
and disciplined verse of Greece and Rome, which it regarded as cold,
formal, and quite unworthy of translation. It surpassed in bold and
extravagant hyperbole, fantastic imagery, and emotional appeal. The
Arab poet heaped metaphor upon metaphor. He was incapable of seeing
that that which was intrinsically beautiful in itself might appear
superfluous and lacking in taste when combined with equally graceful
but discordant elements. Many critics hasten to reassure us regarding
his judgment and discrimination. But even a slight acquaintance
with Arabic literature will show that they have been carried away
by their prejudice in favour of the subject on which they wrote. In
the garden of the Arabian poet every flower is a jewel, every plot
is a silken carpet, tapestried with the intricate patterns of the
weavers of Persia, and every maiden is a houri, each of whose physical
attributes becomes in turn the subject of a glowing quatrain. The
constant employment of synonym and superlative, the extravagance of
amorous emotion, and the frequent absence of all message, of that
large utterance in which the poets of the West have indicated to the
generation they served how it might best grapple with problems of
mind and soul--these were the weaknesses of the Arab singers. They
made apophthegm take the place of message. They were unaware that
the fabric of poetry is not only a palace of pleasure, but a great
academy of the soul.
The true love of nature, too, seems to have been as much lacking in
the Arab as in the Greek and the Roman. He enamelled his theme with the
meticulous care of a jeweller. Not content with painting the lily, he
burnished it until it seemed a product of the goldsmith's art. To him
nature was a thing not only to be improved upon, but to be surpassed,
a mine of gems in the rough, to be patiently polished.
But it would be wrong to refuse to the imaginative literature of the
Arabs a high place among the world's achievements, and we must regret
that, for causes into which we cannot enter here, opportunities for
development and discipline were not vouchsafed it. As we read the
history of the Arabian states with their highly developed civilization,
their thronged academies, and their far-flung dominions, reaching
from Central Asia to the western gates of the Mediterranean, and turn,
to-day to the scenes where such things flourished, we must indeed be
unimaginative if we fail to be impressed by the universal wreck and
ruin to which these regions have been exposed. The great, emulous,
and spirited race which conquered and governed them gathered the world
to its doors, and the rude peoples of Europe clustered about its knees
to listen to the magical tales of unfolding science which fell from
its lips. From the desert it came, and to the desert it has returned.
Djamshîd, the palace is a lions' lair
Where ye held festival with houris fair;
The desert ass bounds upon Barlaam's tomb:
Where are the pomps of yesterday, ah, where?
Moorish 'Fashion' in Spanish Romance
Of Moorish grandeur of thought and luxuriance of emotion we find
little in Spanish literature, at least until the beginning of the
fifteenth century. Its note is distinctively, nay almost aggressively,
European, as will be readily understood from the circumstances of its
origin. [23] But it would seem that with the Castilian occupation
of the Moorish parts of Spain the atmosphere which the Saracen had
left behind him powerfully affected the Spaniard, who appears to
have cast a halo of romance round the character of his ancient foe,
with whose civilization, as expressed in its outward manifestations
of architecture and artifact, he could scarcely have failed to
be deeply impressed. If our conclusions are well founded it would
appear that about the era alluded to a Moorish 'fashion' set in in
Spanish literature, just as did an Oriental craze in the England of
Byron and Moore, when English people began to travel in the Levantine
countries. But this fashion was in great measure pseudo-Saracenic,
unaffected by literary models and derived indirectly more from
atmosphere and art than directly from men or books. Long before the
fifteenth century, however, with its rather artificial mania for
everything Moresque, the Arab spirit had been at work upon Spanish
literature, although in a feeble and unconscious manner. Spanish
literary forms, whether in verse or prose, owe absolutely nothing
to it, and especially is this the case in regard to the assonance
which characterizes Castilian poetry, a prosodic device found in the
verse of all Romance tongues at an early period. The Moors, however,
seem to have sophisticated, if they did not write, the ballads of
the Hispano-Moorish frontiers, especially those which have reference
to the loss of Alhamia. In any case these are founded upon Moorish
legends. Certain metrical pedants, like the Marquis de Santillana,
toyed with Arabic verse-forms as Swinburne did with the French rondeau
or Dobson with the ballade, or as the dry-as-dusts of our universities
with Greek hexameters, neglecting for the alien and recondite the
infinite possibilities of their mother-tongue. These preciosities, to
which many men of letters in all ages have been addicted, had no more
effect upon the main stream of Castilian literature than such attempts
ever have upon the literary output of a country. Some of the popular
coplas, or couplets, however, seem to be direct translations from
the Arabic, which is not surprising when we remember the considerable
number of half-breeds to be found in the Peninsula until the middle of
the seventeenth century. There can be no doubt, too, that Arabic was
the spoken language of thousands of Christians in Southern Spain. But
that it had a determined opponent in the native Spanish is becoming
more and more clear--an opponent which it found as merciless as the
Moor found the Spaniard. [24]
Perhaps the best measure of the decline of Arabic as a spoken language
in Spain is the fact that the authors of many romances declare them to
be mere translations from the Arabic--usually the writings of Moorish
magicians or astrologers. These pretensions are easily refuted by
means of internal evidence. But regarding the question broadly and
sanely, Spanish literature could no more remain unaffected by Arab
influence than could Spanish music, architecture, or handicrafts. All
such influences, however, were undoubtedly late, and, as regards the
romances, were much more 'spiritual' than 'material.' Christian Spain
had held off the Saracen for eight hundred years, and when at last
she consented to drink out of the Saracen cup she filled it with her
own wine. But the strange liquor which had brimmed it before left
behind it the mysterious odours and scents of the Orient, faint,
yet unmistakable.
The Type of Spanish Romance
The type of Spanish romance at its best is that in which the spirit
of wonder is mingled with the spirit of chivalry. Old Spain, with
her glorious ideas of honour, her finely wrought sense of chivalry,
and her birthright of imagination, provided almost a natural crucible
for the admixture of the elements of romance. Every circumstance
of climate and environment assisted and fostered the illusions with
which Spanish story teemed, and above all there was a more practical
interest in the life chivalric in Spain than, perhaps, in any other
country in Europe. The Spaniard carried the insignia of chivalry more
properly than Frenchman or Englishman. It was his natural apparel, and
he brought to its wearing a dignity, a gravity, and a consciousness of
fitness unsurpassed. If he degenerated into a Quixote it was because of
the whole-hearted seriousness with which he had embraced the knightly
life. He was certainly the first to laugh when he found that his
manners, like his mail, had become obsolete. But even the sound of
that laughter is knightly, and the book which aroused it has surely
won at least as many hearts for romanticism as ever it disillusioned.
The history of Spanish conquest is a chronicle of champions, of
warriors almost superhuman in ambition and endurance, mighty carvers
of kingdoms, great remodellers of the world's chart, who, backed by a
handful of lances, and whether in Valencia, Mexico, Italy, or Araucan,
surpassed the fabulous deeds of Amadis or Palmerin. In a later day the
iron land of Castile was to send forth iron men who were to carry her
banners across an immensity of ocean to the uttermost parts of the
earth. What inspired them to live and die in harness surrounded by
dangers more formidable than the enchantments of malevolent sorcerers
or than ever confronted knights-errant in the quest of mysterious
castles? What heartened them in an existence of continuous strife,
privation, and menace? Can we doubt that the hero-tales of their
native land magically moved and inspired them--that when going into
battle the exploits of the heroes of romance rang in their ears like
a fanfare from the trumpets of heralds at a tournament?
And as we gat us to the fight
Our armour and our hearts seemed light
Thinking on battle's cheer,
Of fierce Orlando's high prowess,
Of Felixmarte's knightliness
And the death of Olivier. [25]