Legends & Romances of Spain. Lewis Spence

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

Illustrations

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       Page

       The Cid bids farewell to his Wife Frontispiece

       A Glimpse of Old Spain 16

       A “Trovador” of Old Spain 50

       The Cid in Battle 64

       Elisena and Perion behold one another 96

       The Firm Island 112

       The Proud Circumstance of Chivalry 132

       Palmerin encounters Fairies at the Edge of the Wood 172

       Partenopex in Melior’s Chamber 190

       Don Roderic is tempted by a Semblance of Cava 210

       Count Alarcos meets his Wife and Children at the Gate of the Castle 218

       Aben Habuz and the Captive Princess 272

       The Three Princesses watch the Approach of the White-sailed Galley 286

       Don Alfonso summons his Sages 308

       Torralva and the Spirits 338

       Don Quixote’s Love-madness 360

Chapter I: The Sources of Spanish Romance

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      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

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      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

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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