The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory Part 24

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 circ.u.mstances 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 doc.u.ment--the famous Charter of Aviles,[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 const.i.tuted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It is true that the Aviles doc.u.ment 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 Aviles charter be genuine, and of its a.s.signed 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 cla.s.s. 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 a.n.a.logues, 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 Muno 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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 ingrat.i.tude. It would be altogether astonis.h.i.+ng 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 pa.s.s 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 caesura, and arranged in distinct though not uniformly long _laisses_, each tipped with an identical a.s.sonance. Further, it so happens that this very a.s.sonance 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 a.s.sonanced in the second and fourth line, but not necessarily showing either rhyme or a.s.sonance 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 caesura, 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] n.o.body 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 a.s.sonance or of rhyme; not only does the consideration that at a certain stage a.s.sonance 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 a.s.sonance 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 mediaeval 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 pa.s.sage 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 repet.i.tion 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 a.s.sonance 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 a.s.sonance (_taiadores_, _tendones_, _varones_). But this sequence is broken incomprehensibly by such end-words as _tomar_; and the length of the lines defies all cla.s.sification, 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 a.s.sonance _a_ and _o_ play a much larger part than the other vowels, whereas in the French a.n.a.logues 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. anos,"

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 a.s.serted his authors.h.i.+p, 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 mediaeval 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 Elia.n.u.s 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 a.s.sonance; one might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provencal original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this "coa.r.s.e 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 cla.s.s. 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 t.i.tular 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, Provencal 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 repere_ 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 _Tresor_, which is or is not a translation of the famous work of Brunetto Latini (dates would here seem awkward).

But the _Cronica General de Espana_, 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 a.s.sisted 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 uben_. 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 quant.i.ty of work of equal accomplishment and inspiration; least of all has she the astonis.h.i.+ng 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.