Legends & Romances of Spain. Lewis Spence

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

       Table of Contents

      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.

      A Glimpse of Old Spain

Throughout the whole Provençal-Catalan4 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

       Table of Contents

      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