Chapter III: “Amadis de Gaul”
There stands a castle on a magic height
Whose spell-besetten pathways ye may climb
If that ye love fair chivalry sublime.
Come, its enchanted turrets yield the sight,
As long ago to demoiselle and knight,
Of many a satrapy of ancient rhyme,
And in its carven corridors shall Time
Display us trophies of a dead delight:
The damascene of armour in the dusk,
Shadows of banners torn from infidels,
The fragments of an unremembered glory,
Fragrant with faint, imperishable musk
Of Moorish fantasy. Dissolve, ye spells!
Open, ye portals of Castilian story!
L. S.
Many a casement in the grey castle of Spanish Romance opens upon vistas of fantastic loveliness or gloomy grandeur, but none commands a prospect so brilliant, so infinitely varied, or so rich in the colours of fantasy as that aery embrasure overlooking the region of marvel and high chivalry where is enacted the gallant and glorious history of Amadis de Gaul. The window of which I speak is perched high in a turret of the venerable fortalice, and displays such a landscape as was dear to the weavers of ancient tapestries or the legend-loving painters of old Florence. Beneath is spread a princely domain of noble meadow-land, crossed and interlaced by the serpent-silver of narrow rivers and rising northward to dim, castellated hills. Far beyond these, remote and seeming more of sky than of earth, soar the blue and jagged peaks of dragon-haunted mountains. This scene of almost supernatural beauty presents, at the first glance, an unbroken richness of colour and radiance. The meadow-land is populous with pavilions and the air is painted with pennons and gilded with the blazonry of banners. The glitter of armour thrills the blood like the challenge of martial music. Strange palaces of marble, white as sculptured ice, rise at the verges of magic forests, or glitter on the edges of the promontories, their gardens and terraces sloping to silent and forlorn beaches. The scene is indeed “Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise.”
Such seems the book of Amadis when first we glance through its rainbow-coloured pages. But when we gain a nearer view by the aid of the romancer’s magical glass we find that the radiant scene is deeply shadowed in places. Ravines profound as night lie near the castled hills, in which all manner of noxious things swarm and multiply. The princely fortresses, the gay palaces, are often the haunts of desperate outlaws or malignant sorcerers. Hideous giants dwell in the mountains, or in the shadowy islands which rise from the pale sea, and dragons have their lairs in fell and forest. But whether it breed light or gloom, the atmosphere of Amadis is suffused with such a glamour that we come to love the darker places; we feel that the horror they hold is but the stronger wine of romance, a vintage which intoxicates.
And if we remain at our point of vantage until nightfall and watch the illumination of this wondrous region by the necromancy of moonshine we shall be granted an even more inspiring draught from the strange chalice of romance. In the mystery of moonlight armour is silvered to an unearthly whiteness, blood-red lights gleam from the turrets of the magicians, and the sylph-like shapes of sorceresses flit from sea to forest like living moonbeams. From the deserts between the hills and the distant mountains come the cries of ravening monsters, and all the fantastic world of Faëry is vivid with life.
What marvel then that when this surpassing picture was unveiled to the eyes of a nation of knights it aroused such a fervour of applause and appreciation as has been granted to few works in the history of literary effort? The author of Amadis displayed to the chivalry of Spain such a world as it had dreamed of. Every knight felt himself a possible Amadis and every damsel deemed herself an Oriana. The philosophy and atmosphere of the book took complete possession of the soul of Spain, banishing grosser ideals and introducing a new code of manners and sentiment. The main plot and the manifold incidents which arise from it were coherently and skilfully arranged, and were not made up of isolated and disconnected accounts of combats, or tedious descriptions of apparel, appointments, or architecture, interspersed with the boastful bellowings of rude paladins or vociferous kings, as the ‘plots’ of the cantares de gesta had been. Moreover, the whole was powerfully infused with the love-philosophy of chivalry, in which woman, instead of being the chattel and plaything of man, found herself exalted to heights of worship, and even of omnipotence, undreamed of by the ruder singers of the cantares.