Legends & Romances of Spain. Lewis Spence

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

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      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

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      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

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      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