Legends & Romances of Spain

by Lewis Spence

Silvio de la Selva

Silvio de la Selva, son of Amadis of Greece and a certain Finistea, is the hero of the twelfth and last book of the Amadis series. He first came into prominence by the gallant display he made against the Russians at the siege of Constantinople, and when the Tsar of that turbulent folk showed a desire to plunge Europe into the distractions of war once more he was not the last to unsheath his falchion and assure the twelve dwarfish ambassadors of the Muscovite that the confederacy of one hundred and sixty monarchs which he had brought together had a small chance of returning to their respective dominions. The resultant siege, with its sallies and combats à outrance, we shall forbear to describe, only remarking en passant that, in the mercantile phrase, its details are ‘up to sample.’ But if the Greek princes bethought them to escape the consequences of having incurred the enmity of the turbulent Russ merely by defeating him in the field, they were destined to receive a rude awakening, for by one fell stroke of necromantic art the entire galaxy was spirited away. Once more the inhabitants of the romantic city on the Bosphorus were plunged into the deepest consternation; but, nothing daunted at the task which now confronted them, the knights and paladins of the family—in themselves an army of no mean dimensions—set out in search of their honoured relatives. But we are not yet liberated from the tangle of plot and counter-plot excogitated by the expiring hackery of Castile, and the dying candle of the great romance of Amadis does not flare up and flicker out with the rescue of the heroes and heroines who have swaggered through its pages in almost immortal sequel of intrigue and battle. For, the princesses having been brought safely back to Constantinople, it was discovered that during their absence some of them had been blessed with little olive branches, many of whose adventures are related, until the bewildered reader, lost in the maze of their story, like Milton’s Satan, looks round in desperation for any outlet of escape, exclaiming with the fallen great one:

“Me miserable, which way shall I fly?”

But, like the doomed archangel, he must ‘dree his weird,’ and wade through the adventures of Spheramond, son of Rogel of Greece, and Amadis of Astre, son of Agesilan—or, better still, he may do as we did, and, reverently closing the worm-eaten volume, restore it to the library, where its embossed back is, perhaps, rather more appreciated than its grotesque contents.

Instead of being hurled from the throne by an incensed and neglected populace, the line of Amadis continued to flourish exceedingly, and perhaps the secret of its success as a dynasty lies in the fact that it was more habitually resident in fire-ringed castles or enchanted islands than in its palace in the metropolis, which it seems to have chiefly employed as a convalescent establishment in which to recover from wounds delivered by magic swords and the poisonous bites of ‘loathly’ dragons, rather than as a seat of governmental activity and imperial direction.

We have seen how the great theme of Amadis of Gaul burst upon Spain in a blaze of glory, and how, mangled by the efforts of fluent hacks, it sank into insignificance amid the derision of the enlightened and the gibes of the vulgar. It is as if our own peerless British epos of Arthur, that thrice heroic treasury of the deeds of those who

Jousted in Aspremont or Montalban,

Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebizond,

had been seized upon by Grub Street and prostituted to the necessities of scribblers. We cannot give thanks enough to the god of letters that it has escaped such a doom, though this has been more by virtue of good hap than through that of any protecting influence. The sequels of Amadis descend by stages of lessening excellence until at length they approach the limits of drivel. But does this sorrowful circumstance in any way dim the glory of the first fine rapture? Nay, no more than darkness can cloud the memory of morning. The knightly eloquence of the original characters may degenerate in rodomontade; the lofty and delicate imagery of the primary books may merge into unspeakable vulgarities of invention; the tender beauty which enchants the first love idyll may become coarse intrigue. But no work of art is to be judged by its imitations. With the exception of the Fifth Book, the remaining Amadis romances are as oleographs placed beside a noble painting. Unrestrained in execution, daubed in colours of the harshest crudity, uneven in outline and distressing in ensemble, they are more fitted for the scullions’ hall than the picture-gallery. Yet they may not be passed over in a work dealing with Spanish romance, and they point a moral which in this twentieth century it is fitting that we should digest—that if a nation acquiesce in the debasement of its literary standards and revel in the worthless and the excitement of meretricious fiction, it will cease to excel among the comity of peoples. Literature is the expression of a nation’s soul. And what species of soul is that which voices itself in crudely jacketed novelettes, redolent of a psychology at once ridiculous and unhealthy? Have we no Cervantes to shatter this ignoble thing to the sound of inextinguishable laughter? Is not the sad lesson of Amadis one for the consideration of our own people? Spain was never so great as when its first books roused her chivalry to an ardour of knightly patriotism, and she was never so little as when the printing-presses of Burgos and Valladolid and Saragossa flooded her cities with a mercenary and undistinguished fiction, prompted by commercial greed, and joyfully received by a public avid for the drug of sensation.