The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory

By George Saintsbury

[Pg 375]

CHAPTER IX.

THE LITERATURE OF THE PENINSULAS.

Limitations of this chapter. Late Greek romance. Its difficulties as a subject. Anna Comnena, &c. Hysminias and Hysmine. Its style. Its story. Its handling. Its "decadence." Lateness of Italian. The "Saracen" theory. The "folk-song" theory. Ciullo d'Alcamo. Heavy debt to France. Yet form and spirit both original. Love-lyric in different European countries. Position of Spanish. Catalan-Provençal. Galician-Portuguese. Castilian. Ballads? The Poema del Cid. A Spanish chanson de geste. In scheme and spirit. Difficulties of its prosody. Ballad-metre theory. Irregularity of line. Other poems. Apollonius and Mary of Egypt. Berceo. Alfonso el Sabio

There is something more than a freak, or a mere geographical adaptation, in taking together, and at the last, the contributions of the three peninsulas which form the extreme south of Europe. For in the present scheme they form, as it were, but an appendix to the present book. The dying literature of Greece—if indeed it be not more proper to describe this phase of Byzantine writing as ghostly rather than moribund—presents at most but one point of interest, and that rather a Frage, a thesis,[Pg 376] than a solid literary contribution. The literature of Italy prior to the fourteenth century is such a daughter of Provençal on the one hand, and is so much more appropriately to be taken in connection with Dante than by itself on the other, that it can claim admission only to be, as it were, "laid on the table." And that of Spain, though full of attraction, had also but just begun, and yields but one certain work of really high importance, the Poema del Cid, for serious comment in our pages. In the case of Spain, and still more in that of Italy, the scanty honour apparently paid here will be amply made up in other volumes of the series. As much can hardly be said of Greece. Conscientious chroniclers of books may, indeed, up to the sixteenth century find something which, though scarcely literature, is at any rate written matter. And at the very last there is the attempt, rather respectable than successful, to re-create at once the language and the literature, for the use of Greeks who are at least questionably Hellenic, in relation to forms and subjects separated by more than a millennium—by nearly two millennia—from the forms and the subjects in regard to which Greek was once a living speech. But Greek literature, the living literary contribution of Greek to Europe, almost ceases with the latest poets of the Anthology.

In what has been called the "ghost" time, however, in that portion of it which belongs to our present period, there is one shadow that flutters with a nearer approach to substance than most. Some glance has been made above at the[Pg 377] question, "What was the exact relation between western romance and that later form of Greek novel-writing of which the chief relic is the Hysminias and Hysmine[180] of Eustathius Macrembolita?" Were these stories, many of which must be lost, or have not yet been recovered, direct, and in their measure original and independent, continuations of the earlier school of Greek romance proper? Did they in that case, through the Crusades or otherwise, come under the notice of the West, and serve as stimulants, if not even directly as patterns, to the far greater achievements of Western romance itself? Do they, on the other hand, owe something to models still farther East? Or are they, as has sometimes been hinted, copies of Western romance itself? Had the still ingenious, though hopelessly effeminate, Byzantine mind caught up the literary style of the visitors it feared but could not keep out?

All these questions are questions exceedingly proper to be stated in a book of this kind; not quite so proper to be worked out in it, even if the working out were possible. But it is impossible for two causes—want of room, which might not be fatal; and want of ascertained fact, which cannot but be so. Despite the vigorous work of recent generations on all literary and historical subjects, no one has yet succeeded, and until some one more patient of investigation than fertile in theory arises, no one is likely to succeed, in laying[Pg 378] down the exact connection between Eastern, Western, and, as go-between, Byzantine literature. Even in matters which are the proper domain of history itself, such as those of the Trojan and Alexandrine Apocryphas, much is still in the vague. In the case of Western Romance, of the later Greek stories, and of such Eastern matter as, for instance, the story of Sharkan and that of Zumurrud and her master in the Arabian Nights, the vague rules supreme. There were, perhaps, trouvère-knights in the garrisons of Edessa or of Jôf who could have told us all about it. But nobody did tell: or if anybody did, the tale has not survived.

But this interest of problem is not the only one that attaches to the "drama," as he calls it, of Eustathius or Eumathius "the philosopher," who flourished at some time between the twelfth and the fourteenth century, and is therefore pretty certainly ours. For the purposes of literary history the book deserves to be taken as the typical contribution of Greek during the period, much better than the famous Alexiad of Anna Comnena[181] in history, or the verse romances of Eustathius's probable contemporaries Theodorus Prodromus and Nicetas Eugenianus.[182] The princess's book, though historically important, and by no means disagreeable to read, is, as literature, chiefly remarkable as exhibiting the ease and the comparative success with which Greek lent itself to the formation of an artificial style noble, more like the writing of the average (not the better) Frenchman[Pg 379] of the eighteenth century than it is like anything else. It is this peculiarity which has facilitated the construction of the literary pastiche called Modern Greek, and perhaps it is this which will long prevent the production of real literature in that language or pseudo-language. On the other hand, the books of Theodorus and Nicetas, devoted, according to rule, to the loves respectively of Rhodanthe and Dosicles, of Charicles and Drosilla, are written in iambic trimeters of the very worst and most wooden description. It is doubtful whether even the great Tragic poets could have made the trimeter tolerable as the vehicle of a long story. In the hands of Theodorus and Nicetas its monotony becomes utterly sickening, while the level of the composition of neither is much above that of a by no means gifted schoolboy, even if we make full allowance for the changes in prosody, and especially in quantity, which had set in for Greek as they had for other languages. The question whether these iambics are more or less terrible than the "political verses"[183] of the Wise Manasses,[184] which usually accompany them in editions, and which were apparently inserted in what must have been the inconceivably dreary romance of "Aristander and Callithea," must be left to individual taste to decide. Manasses also wrote a History of the World in the same rhythm, and it is possible that he may have occasionally forgotten which of the two books he was writing at any given time.

[Pg 380]

But Hysminias and Hysmine[185] has interests of character which distinguish its author and itself, not merely from the herd of chroniclers and commentators who make up the bulk of Byzantine literature so-called, but even from such more respectable but somewhat featureless work as Anna Comnena's. It is not a good book; but it is by no means so extremely bad as the traditional judgment (not always, perhaps, based on or buttressed by direct acquaintance with the original) is wont to give out. On one at least of the sides of this interest it is quite useless to read it except in the original, for the attraction is one of style. Its style.Neither Lyly nor any of our late nineteenth-century "stylists" has outgone, perhaps none has touched, Eustathius in euphuism. It is needless to say that while the simplicity of the best Greek style usually prefers the most direct and natural order, its suppleness lends itself to almost any gymnastic, and its lucidity prevents total confusion from arising. Eustathius has availed himself of these opportunities for "raising his mother tongue to a higher power" to the very utmost. No translation can do justice to the elaborate foppery of even the first sentence,[186] with its coquetry[Pg 381] of arrangement, its tormented structure of phrase, its jingle of sound-repetition, its desperate rejection of simplicity in every shape and form. To describe precisely the means resorted to would take a chapter at least. They are astonishingly modern—the present tense, the use of catchwords like ὅλος, the repetitions and jingles above referred to. Excessively elaborate description of word-painting, though modern too, can hardly be said to be a novelty: it had distinguished most of the earlier Greek novelists, especially Achilles Tatius. But there is something in the descriptions of Hysminias and Hysmine more mediæval than those of Achilles, more like the Romance of the Rose, to which, indeed, there is a curious resemblance of atmosphere in the book. Triplets of epithet—"a man athirst, and parched, and boiling"—meet us. There is a frequent economy of conjunctions. There is the resort to personification—for instance, in the battle of Love and Shame, which serves as climax to the elaborate description of the lovers' kissing. In short, all our old friends—the devices which every generation of seekers after style parades with such a touching conviction that they are quite new, and which every literary student knows to be as old as literature—are to be found here. The language is in its decadence: the writer has not much to say. But it is surprising how much, with all his drawbacks, he accomplishes.

Whether the book, either as an individual composition, or more probably as a member of an extinct class, is as important in matter and in tone as it is in style is more doubtful. The style itself, as to which there[Pg 382] is no doubt, may perhaps colour the matter too much. All that can be safely said is that it reads with distinctly modern effect after Heliodorus and Achilles, Longus and Xenophon. The story is not much. Hysminias, a beautiful youth of the city of Eurycomis, is chosen for a religious embassy or kerukeia to the neighbouring town of Aulicomis. The task of acting as host to him falls on one Sosthenes, whose daughter Hysmine strikes Hysminias with love at first sight. The progress of their passion is facilitated by the pretty old habit of girls acting as cupbearers, and favoured by accident to no small degree, the details of the courtship being sometimes luscious, but adjusted to less fearless old fashions than the wooings of Chloe or of Melitta. Adventures by land and sea follow; and, of course, a happy ending.

But what is really important is the way in which these things are handled. It has as mere story-telling little merit: the question is whether the spirit, the conduct, the details, do not show a temper much more akin to mediæval than to classical treatment. I think they do. Hysminias is rather a silly, and more than rather a chicken-hearted, fellow; his conduct on board ship when his beloved incurs the fate of Jonah is eminently despicable: but then he was countryman ex hypothesi of Mourzoufle, not of Villehardouin. The "battailous" spirit of the West is not to be expected in a Byzantine sophist. Whether something of its artistic and literary spirit is not to be detected in him is a more doubtful question. For my part, I cannot read of Hysmine without being re[Pg 383]minded of Nicolette, as I am never reminded in other parts of the Scriptores Erotici.

Yet, experiment or remainder, imitation or original, one cannot but feel that the book, like all the literature to which it belongs, has more of the marks of death than of life in it. Its very elegances are "rose-coloured curtains for the doctors"—the masque of a moribund art. Some of them may have been borrowed by, rather than from, younger and hopefuller craftsmanship, but the general effect is the same. We are here face to face with those phenomena of "decadence," which, though they have often been exaggerated and wrongly interpreted, yet surely exist and reappear at intervals—the contortions of style that cannot afford to be natural, the tricks of word borrowed from literary reminiscence (ὅλος itself in this way is at least as old as Lucian), the tormented effort at detail of description, at "analysis" of thought and feeling, of incident and moral. The cant phrase about being "né trop tard dans un monde trop vieux" has been true of many persons, while more still have affected to believe it true of themselves, since Eustathius: it is not much truer of any one than of him.

Curious as such specimens of a dying literature may be, it cannot but be refreshing to go westward from it to the nascent literatures of Italy and of Spain, literatures which have a future instead of merely a past, and which, independently of that somewhat illegitimate advantage, have characteristics not unable to bear comparison with those of the past, even had it existed.[Pg 384]

Between the earliest Italian and the earliest Spanish literature, however, there are striking differences to be noted. Persons ignorant of the usual course of literary history might expect in Italian a regular and unbroken development, literary as well as linguistic, of Latin. But, as a matter of fact, the earliest vernacular literature in Italy shows very little trace of classical influence[187]: and though that influence appears strongly in the age immediately succeeding ours, and helps to produce the greatest achievements of the language, it may be questioned whether its results were wholly beneficial. In the earliest Italian, or rather Sicilian, poetry quite different influences are perceptible. One of them—the influence of the literatures of France, both Southern and Northern—is quite certain and incontestable. The intercourse between the various Romance-speaking nations surrounding the western Mediterranean was always close; and the development of Provençal literature far anticipated, both in date and form, that of any other. Moreover, some northern influence was undoubtedly communicated by the Norman conquests of the eleventh century.[Pg 385] But two other strains—one of which has long been asserted with the utmost positiveness, while the latter has been a favourite subject of Italian patriotism since the political unification of the country—are much more dubious. Because it is tolerably certain that Italian poetry in the modern literary sense arose in Sicily, and because Sicily was beyond all doubt almost more Saracen than Frank up to the twelfth century, it was long, and has not quite ceased to be, the fashion to assign a great, if not the greatest, part to Arabian literature. Not merely the sonnet (which seems to have arisen in the two Sicilies), but even the entire system of rhymed lyrical verse, common in the modern languages, has been thus referred to the East by some.

This matter can probably never be pronounced upon, with complete satisfaction to readers, except by a literary critic who is equally competent in Eastern and Western history and literature, a person who certainly has not shown himself as yet. What can be said with some confidence is, that the Saracen theory of Literature, like the Saracen theory of Architecture, so soon as it is carried beyond the advancing of a possible but slight and very indeterminate influence and colouring, has scarcely the slightest foundation in known facts, and is very difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with facts that are known, while it is intrinsically improbable to the very highest degree. As has been pointed out above, the modern prosody of Europe is quite easily and logically explicable as the result of the juxtaposition of the Latin rhythms of the Church service, and the[Pg 386] verse systems indigenous in the different barbaric nations. That the peculiar cast and colour of early Italian poetry may owe something of that difference which it exhibits, even in comparison with Provençal, much more with French, most of all with Teutonic poetry, to contact with Arabian literature, is not merely possible but probable. Anything more must be regarded as not proven, and not even likely.

Of late, however, attempts have been made to assign the greater part of the matter to no foreign influence whatever, but to native folk-songs, in which at the present time, and no doubt for a long time back, Italy is beyond all question rich above the wont of European countries. But this attempt, however interesting and patriotic, labours under the same fatal difficulties which beset similar attempts in other languages. It may be regarded as perfectly certain that we do not possess any Italian popular poem in any form which can have existed prior to the thirteenth century; and only such poems would be of any use. To argue, as is always argued in such cases, that existing examples show, by this or that characteristic, that in other forms they must have existed in the twelfth century or even earlier, is only an instance of that learned childishness which unfortunately rules so widely in literary, though it has been partly expelled from general, history. "May have been" and "must have been" are phrases of no account to a sound literary criticism, which insists upon "was." Ciullo d'Alcamo.And in reference to this particular subject of Early Italian Poetry the reader may be[Pg 387] referred to the very learned dissertation[188] of Signor Alessandro d'Ancona on the Contrasto of Ciullo d'Alcamo, which has been commonly regarded as the first specimen of Italian poetry, and has been claimed for the beginning of the thirteenth century, if not the end of the twelfth. He will, if the gods have made him in the least critical, rise from the perusal with the pretty clear notion that whether Ciullo d'Alcamo was "such a person," or whether he was Cielo dal Camo; whether the Contrasto was written on the bridge of the twelfth and thirteenth century, or fifty years later; whether the poet was a warrior of high degree or an obscure folk-singer; whether his dialect has been Tuscanised or is still Sicilian with French admixture,—these are things not to be found out, things of mere opinion and hypothesis, things good to write programmes and theses on, but only to be touched in the most gingerly manner by sober history.

To the critic, then, who deals with Dante—and especially to him, inasmuch as he has the privilege of dealing with that priceless document, the De Vulgari Eloquio,[189]—may be left Ciullo, or Cielo, and his successors the Frederician set, from the Emperor himself and Piero delle Vigne downwards. More[Pg 388] especially to him belong the poets of the late thirteenth century, Dante's own immediate predecessors, contemporaries, and in a way masters—Guinicelli, Cavalcanti, Sinibaldi, and Guittone d'Arezzo (to whom the canonical form of the sonnet used at one time to be attributed, and may be again); Brunetto Latini, of fiery memory; Fra Jacopone,[190] great in Latin, eccentric in Italian, and others. It will be not merely sufficient, but in every way desirable, here to content ourselves with an account of the general characteristics of this poetry (contemporary prose, though existent, is of little importance), and to preface this by some remarks on the general influences and contributions of material with which Italian literature started.

There is no valid reason for doubting that these influences and materials were mainly French. As has been partly noted in a former chapter, the French chansons de geste made an early and secure conquest of the Italian ear in the north, partly in translation, partly in the still more unmistakable form of macaronic Italianised French. It has indeed been pointed out that the Sicilian school was to some extent preceded by that of the Trevisan March, the most famous member of which was Sordello. It would appear, however, that this school was even more distinctly and exclusively a branch of Provençal than the Sicilian; and that the[Pg 389] special characteristic of the latter did not appear in it. The Carlovingian poems (and to some, though a much less, extent the Arthurian) made a deep impression both on popular and on cultivated Italian taste as a matter of subject; but their form, after its first results in variation and translation, was not perpetuated; and when Italian epic made its appearance some centuries later, it inclined for the most part to burlesque, or at least to the tragi-comic, until the serious genius of Tasso gave it a new, but perhaps a not wholly natural, direction.

In that earliest, really national, and vernacular school, however, which has been the chief subject of discourse, the direction was mainly and almost wholly towards lyric; and the supremacy of the sonnet and the canzone is the less surprising because their rivals were for the most part less accomplished examples of the same kind. The Contrasto[191] of Ciullo itself is a poem in lyric stanzas of five lines—three of sixteen syllables, rhymed a, and two hendecasyllabics, rhymed b. The rhymes are fairly exact, though sometimes loose, o and u, e and i, being permitted to pair. The poem, a simple discourse or dispute between two lovers, something in the style of some French pastourelles, displays however, with some of the exaggeration and stock phrase of Provençal (perhaps we might say of all) love-poetry, little or nothing of that peculiar mystical tone which we have been accustomed to associate with early[Pg 390] Italian verse, chiefly represented, as it is to most readers, by the Vita Nuova, where the spirit is slightly altered in itself, and speaks in the mouth of a poet greater in his weakest moments than the whole generation from Ciullo to Guittone in their strongest. This spirit, showing itself in the finer and more masculine form in Dante himself, in the more feminine and weaker in Petrarch, not merely gives us sublime or exquisite poetry in the fourteenth century, but in the sixteenth contributes very largely to launch, on fresh careers of achievement, the whole poetry of France and of England. But it is fair to acknowledge its presence in Dante's predecessors, and at the same time to confess that they themselves do not seem to have learned it from any one, or at least from any single master or group of masters. The Provençal poets deify passion, and concentrate themselves wholly upon it; but it is seldom, indeed, that we find the "metaphysical" touch in the Provençals proper. And it is this—this blending of love and religion, of scholasticism and minnedienst (to borrow a word wanted in other languages than that in which it exists)—that is attributed by the partisans of the East to Arabian influence, or at least to Arabian contact. Some stress has been laid on the testimony of Ibn Zobeir about the end of the twelfth century, and consequently not long before even the latest date assigned to Ciullo, that Alcamo itself was entirely Mussulman in belief.

On these points it is not possible to decide: the point on which to lay the finger for our present[Pg 391] purpose is that the contribution of Italy at this time was, on the one hand, the further refinement of the Provençal attention to form, and the production of one capital instrument of European poetry—the sonnet; on the other, the conveyance, by means of this instrument and others, of a further, and in one way almost final, variation of the poetic expression of love. It is of the first importance to note the characteristics, in different nations at nearly the same time, of this rise of lyrical love-poetry. We find it in Northern and Southern France, probably at about the same time; in Germany and Italy somewhat later, and almost certainly in a state of pupilship to the French. All, in different ways, display a curious and delightful metrical variety, as if the poet were trying to express the eternal novelty, combined with the eternal oneness, of passion by variations of metrical form. In each language these variations reflect national peculiarities—in Northern French and German irregular bursts with a multiplicity of inarticulate refrain, in Provençal and Italian a statelier and more graceful but somewhat more monotonous arrangement and proportion.

And the differences of spirit are equally noticeable, though one must, as always, be careful against generalising too rashly as to their identity with supposed national characteristics. The innumerable love-poems of the trouvères, pathetic sometimes, and sometimes impassioned, are yet, as a rule, cheerful, not very deep, verging not seldom on pure comedy.[Pg 392] The so-called monotonous enthusiasm of the troubadour, his stock-images, his musical form, sublime to a certain extent the sensual side of love, but confine themselves to that side merely, as a rule, or leave it only to indulge in the purely fantastic.

Of those who borrowed from them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb of devotion.[192] Among those collections for which the student of letters pines, not the least desirable would be a corpus of the lyric poets of Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. We should then see—after a fashion difficult if not impossible in the sporadic study of texts edited piecemeal, and often overlaid with comment not of the purely literary kind—at once the general similarity and the local or individual exceptions, the filiation of form, the diffusion of spirit. No division of literature, perhaps, would serve better as a kind of chrestomathy for illustrating the positions on which the scheme of this series is based. And though it is overshadowed by the achievements of its own pupils; though it has a double portion of the mediæval defect of "school"-work—of the almost tedious similarity of different men's manner—the Italian poetry, which is practically the Italian literature, of the thirteenth[Pg 393] century would be not the least interesting part of such a corpus.

The Spanish literature[193] with which we have to do is probably inferior in bulk even to that of Italy; it is certainly far less rich in named and more or less known authors, while it is a mere drop as compared with the Dead Sea of Byzantine writing. But by virtue of at least one really great composition, the famous Poema del Cid, it ranks higher than either of these groups in sheer literary estimation, while from the point of view of literary history it is perhaps more interesting than the Italian, and certainly far more interesting than the Greek. It does not rank with French as an instance of real literary preponderance and chieftainship; or with German as an example of the sudden if short blossoming of a particular period and dialect into great if not wholly original literary prominence;[Pg 394] much less with Icelandic and Provençal, as containing a "smooth and round" expression of certain definite characteristics of literature and life once for all embodied. It has to give way not merely to Provençal, but to Italian itself as an example of early scholarship in literary form. But it makes a most interesting pair to English as an instance of vigorous and genuine national literary development; while, if it is inferior to English, as showing that fatal departmental or provincial separation, that "particularism" which has in many ways been so disastrous to the Peninsula, it once more, by virtue of the Poema, far excels our own production of the period in positive achievement, and foretells the masterpieces of the national poetry in a way very different from any that can be said to be shown in Layamon or the Ancren Riwle, even in the Arthurian romances and the early lyrics.

The earliest literature which, in the wide sense, can be called Spanish divides itself into three heads—Provençal-Catalan; Galician-Portuguese; and Castilian or Spanish proper. Not merely Catalonia itself, but Aragon, Navarre, and even Valencia, were linguistically for centuries mere outlying provinces of the langue d'oc. The political circumstances which attended the dying-out of the Provençal school at home, for a time even encouraged the continuance of Provençal literature in Spain: and to a certain extent Spanish and Provençal appear to have been written, if not spoken, bilingually by the same authors. But for the general purpose of this book the fact of the persistence of the "Limousin"[Pg 395] tongue in Catalonia and (strongly dialected) in Valencia having been once noted, not much further notice need be taken of this division.

So also we may, with a brief distinctive notice, pass by the Galician dialects which found their perfected literary form later in Portuguese. No important early literature remains in Galician, and of Portuguese itself there does not seem to be anything certainly dating before the fourteenth century, or anything even probably attributed to an earlier time except a certain number of ballads, as to the real antiquity of which a sane literary criticism has always to reiterate the deepest and most irremovable doubts. The fact of the existence of this dialect, and of its development later into the language of Camoens, is of high interest: the positive documents which at this time it offers for comment are very scanty indeed.

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 cir[Pg 396]cumstances 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 document—the famous Charter of Avilés,[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 constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It is true that the Avilés document is not quite so jargonish as the Strasburg, but the same mark—the presence of undigested Latin—appears in both.

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 Avilés charter be genuine, and of its assigned 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.

As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must be repeated at somewhat greater[Pg 397] 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 class. 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[Pg 398] 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 fashion 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.

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[Pg 399] 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.

But in the criticism of his poetical history this is[Pg 400] 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 analogues, 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[Pg 401] 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 Muño Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya.

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 ingratitude, 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 ingratitude. It would be altogether astonishing 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.

When we pass 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 cæsura, and arranged in distinct though not uniformly long laisses, each tipped with an identical assonance.[Pg 402] Further, it so happens that this very assonance 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 assonanced in the second and fourth line, but not necessarily showing either rhyme or assonance 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.

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[Pg 403] 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.

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 cæsura, 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] nobody 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.

And the ends of the verses are as troublesome as[Pg 404] their bodies. Not only is there no absolute system either of assonance or of rhyme; not only does the consideration that at a certain stage assonance 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 assonance 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 mediæval 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[Pg 405] cutting of the knot as the supposition that the copyist has made "pie" of about seventy per cent at least of the whole.

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 passage 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 repetition 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 assonance 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 assonance (taiadores, tendones, varones). But this sequence is broken incomprehensibly by such end-words as tomar; and the length of the lines defies all classification, 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

as two.[Pg 406]

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 assonance a and o play a much larger part than the other vowels, whereas in the French analogues 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—

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 asserted his authorship, though he may have been the copyist-malefactor of theory. And it may perhaps[Pg 407] be added that if mccxlv. is the correct date, this would correspond to 1207 of our chronology, the Spanish mediæval era starting thirty-eight years too early.

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 Elianus 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.

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[Pg 408] that metre, and varying from five syllables to at least eleven. The rhymes are good, with very rare lapses into assonance; one might suspect a pretty close adherence to a probably Provençal original, and perhaps not a very early date. Ticknor, whose Protestantism or whose prudery seems to have been shocked by this "coarse 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 class. 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.

Berceo, who appears to have written more than thir[Pg 409]teen 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.

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 titular 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:[Pg 410] 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, Provençal 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 repère 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 Trésor, which is or is not a translation of the famous work of Brunetto Latini (dates would here seem awkward). But the Cronica General de España, 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 assisted 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[Pg 411] 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 üben. 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 quantity of work of equal accomplishment and inspiration; least of all has she the astonishing 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.

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