Volume II Part 16 (1/2)

[8] The fabliaux cannot fairly be considered as an exception to this.

These graceful little performances, the work of professed bards, who had nothing further in view than the amus.e.m.e.nt of a listless audience, have little claim to be considered as the expression of national feeling or sentiment. The poetry of the south of France, more impa.s.sioned and lyrical in its character, wears the stamp, not merely of patrician elegance, but refined artifice, which must not be confounded with the natural flow of popular minstrelsy.

[9] How far the achievements claimed for the Campeador are strictly true, is little to the purpose. It is enough that they were received as true, throughout the Peninsula, as far back as the twelfth, or, at latest, the thirteenth century.

[10] One exception, among others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version of it in the ”Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain,” from the pen of Mr. Bowring, to whom the literary world is so largely indebted for an acquaintance with the popular minstrelsy of Europe.

[11] I have already noticed the insufficiency of the _romances_ to authentic history, Part I. Chap. 8, Note 30. My conclusions there have been confirmed by Mr. Irving, (whose researches have led him in a similar direction,) in his ”Alhambra,” published nearly a year after the above note was written.

The great source of the popular misconceptions respecting the domestic history of Granada is Gines Perez de Hyta, whose work, under the t.i.tle of ”Historia de los Vandos de los Zegries y Abencerrages, Cavalleros Moros de Granada, y las Guerras Civiles que huvo en ella,” was published at Alcala in 1604. This romance, written in prose, embodied many of the old Moorish ballads in it, whose singular beauty, combined with the romantic and picturesque character of the work itself, soon made it extremely popular, until at length it seems to have acquired a degree of the historical credit claimed for it by its author as a translation from an Arabian chronicle; a credit which has stood it in good stead with the tribe of travel-mongers and _raconteurs_, persons always of easy faith, who have propagated its fables far and wide. Their credulity, however, may be pardoned in what has imposed on the perspicacity of so cautions an historian as Muller. Allgemeine Geschichte, (1817,) band ii. p. 504.

[12] Thus, in one of their _romances_, we have a Moorish lady ”shedding drops of liquid silver, and scattering her hair of Arabian gold” over the corpse of her murdered husband!

”Sobre el cuerpo de Albencayde Destila liquida plata, Y convertida en cabellos Esparce el oro de Arabia.”

Can anything be more Oriental than this imagery? In another we have ”an hour of years of impatient hopes;” a pa.s.sionate sally, that can scarcely be outmatched by Scriblerus. This taint of exaggeration, however, so far from being peculiar to the popular minstrelsy, has found its way, probably through this channel in part, into most of the poetry of the Peninsula.

[13] The _redondilla_ may be considered as the basis of Spanish versification. It is of great antiquity, and compositions in it are still extant, as old as the time of the infante Don Manuel, at the close of the thirteenth century. (See Cancionero General, fol. 207.) The redondilla admits of great variety; but in the romances it is most frequently found to consist of eight syllables, the last foot, and some or all of the preceding, as the case may be, being trochees. (Rengifo, Arte Poetica Espanola, (Barcelona, 1727,) cap. 9, 44.) Critics have derived this delightful measure from various sources. Sarmiento traces it to the hexameter of the ancient Romans, which may be bisected into something a.n.a.logous to the redondillas. (Memorias, pp. 168-171.) Bouterwek thinks it may have been suggested by the songs of the Roman soldiery. (Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, band iii., Einleitung, p. 20.)--Velazquez borrows it from the rhyming hexameters of the Spanish Latin poets, of which he gives specimens of the beginning of the fourteenth century.

(Poesia Castellana, pp. 77, 78.) Later critics refer its derivation to the Arabic. Conde has given a translation of certain Spanish-Arabian poems, in the measure of the original, from which it is evident, that the hemistich of an Arabian verse corresponds perfectly with the redondilla. (See his Dominacion de los Arabes, pa.s.sim.) The same author, in a treatise, which he never published, on the ”poesia oriental,” shows more precisely the intimate affinity subsisting between the metrical form of the Arabian and the old Castilian verse. The reader will find an a.n.a.lysis of his ma.n.u.script in Part I. Chap. 8, Note 49, of this History.

This theory is rendered the more plausible by the influence which the Arabic has exercised on Castilian versification in other respects, as in the prolonged repet.i.tion of the rhyme, for example, which is wholly borrowed from the Spanish Arabs; whose superior cultivation naturally affected the unformed literature of their neighbors, and through no channel more obviously than its popular minstrelsy.

[14] The _asonante_ is a rhyme made by uniformity of the vowels, without reference to the consonants; the regular rhyme, which obtains in other European literatures, is distinguished in Spain by the term _consonante_.

Thus the four following words, taken at random from a Spanish ballad, are consecutive _asonantes_; _regozijo_, _pellico_, _luzido_, _amarillo_. In this example, the two last syllables have the a.s.sonance; although this is not invariable, it sometimes falling on the antepenultima and the final syllable. (See Rengifo, Arte Poetica Espanola, pp. 214, 215, 218.) There is a wild, artless melody in the _asonante_, and a graceful movement coming somewhere, as it does, betwixt regular rhyme and blank verse, which would make its introduction very desirable, but not very feasible, in our own language. An attempt of the kind has been made by a clever writer, in the Retrospective Review. (Vol. iv. art. 2.) If it has failed, it is from the impediments presented by the language, which has not nearly the same amount of vowel terminations, nor of simple uniform vowel sounds, as the Spanish; the double termination, however full of grace and beauty in the Castilian, a.s.sumes, perhaps from the effect of a.s.sociation, rather a doggerel air in the English.

[15] This may be still further inferred from the tenor of a humorous, satirical old _romance_, in which the writer implores the justice of Apollo on the heads of the swarm of traitor poets, who have deserted the ancient themes of song, the Cids, the Laras, the Gonzalez, to celebrate the Ganzuls and Abderrahmans and the fantastical fables of the Moors.

”Tanta Zayda y Adalifa, tanta Draguta y Daraxa, tanto Azarque y tanto Adulce, tanto Gazul, y Abenamar, tanto alquizer y marlota, tanto almayzar, y almalafa, tantas emprisas y plumas, tantas cifras y medallas, tanta roperia Mora.

Y en vanderillas y adargas, tanto mote, y tantas motas muera yo sino me cansan.”

”Los Alfonsos, los Henricos, los Sanchos, y los de Lara, que es dellos, y que es del Cid?

tanto olvido en glorias tantas?

ninguna pluma las buela, ninguna Musa las canta?

Justicia, Apollo, justicia, vengadores rayos lanca contra Poetas Moriscos.”

Dr. Johnson's opinions are well known, in regard to this department of English literature, which, by his ridiculous parodies, he succeeded for a time in throwing into the shade, or, in the language of his admiring biographer, made ”perfectly contemptible.”

Petrarch, with like pedantry, rested his hopes of fame on his Latin epic, and gave away his lyrics, as alms to ballad-singers. Posterity, deciding on surer principles of taste, has reversed both these decisions.

[16] ”Algunos quieren que sean la cartilla de los Poetas; yo no lo siento a.s.si; antes bien los hallo capaces, no solo de exprimir y declarar qualquier concepto con facil dulzura, pero de prosequir toda grave accion de numeroso Poema. Y soy tan de veras Espanol, que por ser en nuestro idioma natural este genero, no me puedo persuadir que no sea digno de toda estimacion.”(Coleccion de Obras Sueltas, (Madrid, 1776-9,) tom. iv. p.

176, Prologo.) In another place he finely styles them ”Iliads without a Homer.”

[17] See, among others, the encomiastic and animated criticism of Fernandez and Quintana. Fernandez, Poesias Escogidas, de Nuestros Cancioneros y Romanceros Antiguos, (Madrid, 1796,) tom. xvi., Prologo.-- Quintana, Poesias Selectas Castellanas, Introd. art. 4.

[18] Nic. Antonio, Bibliotheca Nova, tom. ii. p. 10.--The Spanish translators of Bouterwek have noticed the princ.i.p.al ”collections and earliest editions” of the _Romances_. This original edition of Sepulveda has escaped their notice. See Literatura Espanola, pp. 217, 218.

[19] See Grimm, Depping, Herder, etc. This last poet has embraced a selection of the Cid ballads, chronologically arranged, and translated with eminent simplicity and spirit, if not with the scrupulous fidelity usually aimed at by the Germans. See his Sammtliche Werke, (Wien, 1813,) band iii.

[20] Sarmiento, Memorias, pp. 242, 243.--Moratin considers that none have come down to us, in their original costume, of an earlier date than John II.'s reign, the first half of the fifteenth century. (Obras, tom. i. p.