The first, extending from the close of the twelfth century to the beginning of the sixteenth, will contain the literature of the country from the first appearance of the present written language to the early part of the reign of Charles V., and will include the genuinely national literature, and that portion which, by imitating the refinement of Provence or of Italy, was, during the same interval, more or less separated from the popular spirit and genius.
The second, the period of literary success and national glory, extending from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the close of the seventeenth, will embrace the literature from the accession of the Austrian family to its extinction.
The third, the period of decline, extends from the beginning of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, or from the accession of the Bourbon family to the present time.
2. THE LANGUAGE.—The Spanish Christians who, after the Moorish conquest, had retreated to the mountains of Asturias, carried with them the Latin language as they had received it corrupted from the Romans, and still more by the elements introduced into it by the invasion of the northern tribes. In their retreat they found themselves amidst the descendants of the Iberians, the earliest race which had inhabited Spain, who appeared to have shaken off little of the barbarism that had resisted alike the invasion of the Romans and of the Goths, and who retained the original Iberian or Basque tongue. Coming in contact with this, the language of those Christians underwent new modifications; later, when they advanced in their conquest toward the south and the east, and found themselves surrounded by those portions of their race that had remained among the Arabs, known as Muçárabes, they felt that they were in the presence of a civilization and refinement altogether superior to their own. As the Goths, between the fifth and eighth centuries, had received a vast number of words from the Latin, because it was the language of a people with whom they were intimately mingled, and who were much more intellectual and advanced than themselves, so, for the same reason, the whole nation, between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, received another increase of their vocabulary from the Arabic, and accommodated themselves in a remarkable degree to the advanced culture of their southern countrymen, and of their new Moorish subjects.
It appears that about the middle of the twelfth century this new dialect had risen to the dignity of being a written language; and it spread gradually through the country. It differed from the pure or the corrupted Latin, and still more from the Arabic; yet it was obviously formed by a union of both, modified by the analogies and spirit of the Gothic constructions and dialects, and containing some remains of the vocabularies of the Iberians, the Celts, the Phoenicians, and of the German tribes, who at different periods had occupied the peninsula. This, like the other languages of Southern Europe, was called originally the Romance, from the prevalence of the Roman and Latin elements.
The territories of the Christian Spaniards were divided into three longitudinal sections, having each a separate dialect, arising from the mixture of different primitive elements. The Catalan was spoken in the east, the Castilian in the centre, while the Galician, which originated the Portuguese, prevailed in the west.
The Catalan or Limousin, the earliest dialect cultivated in the peninsula, bore a strong resemblance to the Provençal, and when the bards were driven from Provence they found a home in the east of Spain, and numerous celebrated troubadours arose in Aragon and Catalonia. But many elements concurred to produce a decay of the Catalan, and from the beginning of the sixteenth century it rapidly declined. It is still spoken in the Balearic Islands and among the lower classes of some of the eastern parts of Spain, but since the sixteenth century the Castilian alone has been the vehicle of literature.
The Castilian dialect followed the fortune of the Castilian arms, until it finally became the established language, even of the most southern provinces, where it had been longest withstood by the Arabic. Its clear, sonorous vowels and the beautiful articulation of its syllables, give it a greater resemblance to the Italian than any other idiom of the peninsula. But amidst this euphony the ear is struck with the sound of the German and Arabic guttural, which is unknown in the other languages in which Latin roots predominate.