Pedro Lopez Ayala (1332-1407), grand chancellor of Castile under four successive sovereigns, was both a poet and a historian. His poem, "Court Rhymes," is the most remarkable of his productions. His style is grave, gentle, and didactic, with occasional expressions of poetic feeling, which seem, however, to belong as much to their age as to their author.
2. OLD BALLADS.—From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the period we have just gone over, the courts of the different sovereigns of Europe were the principal centres of refinement and civilization, and this was peculiarly the case in Spain during this period, when literature was produced or encouraged by the sovereigns and other distinguished men. But this was not the only literature of Spain. The spirit of poetry diffused throughout the peninsula, excited by the romantic events of Spanish history, now began to assume the form of a popular literature, and to assert for itself a place which in some particulars it has maintained ever since. This popular literature may be distributed into four different classes. The first contains the Ballads, or the narrative and lyrical poetry of the common people from the earliest times; the second, the Chronicles, or the half-genuine, half-fabulous histories of the great events and heroes of the national annals; the third class comprises the Romances of Chivalry, intimately connected with both the others, and, after a time, as passionately admired by the whole nation; and the fourth includes the Drama, which in its origin has always been a popular and religious amusement, and was hardly less so in Spain than it was in Greece or in France. These four classes compose what was generally most valued in Spanish literature during the latter part of the fourteenth century, the whole of the fifteenth, and much of the sixteenth. They rested on the deep foundations of the national character, and therefore by their very nature were opposed to the Provençal, the Italian, and the courtly schools, which flourished during the same period.
The metrical structure of the old Spanish ballad was extremely simple, consisting of eight-syllable lines, which are composed with great facility in other languages as well as the Castilian. Sometimes they were broken into stanzas of four lines each, thence called redondillas, or roundelays, but their prominent peculiarity is that of the asonante, an imperfect rhyme that echoes the same vowel, but not the same final consonant in the terminating syllables. This metrical form was at a later period adopted by the dramatists, and is now used in every department of Spanish poetry.
The old Spanish ballads comprise more than a thousand poems, first collected in the sixteenth century, whose authors and dates are alike unknown. Indeed, until after the middle of that century, it is difficult to find ballads written by known authors. These collections, arranged without regard to chronological order, relate to the fictions of chivalry, especially to Charlemagne and his peers, to the traditions and history of Spain, to Moorish adventures, and to the private life and manners of the Spaniards themselves; they belong to the unchronicled popular life and character of the age which gave them birth. The ballads of chivalry, with the exception of those relating to Charlemagne, occupy a less important place than those founded on national subjects. The historical ballads are by far the most numerous and the most interesting; and of those the first in the order of time are those relating to Bernardo del Carpio, concerning whom there are about forty. Bernardo (fl. 800) was the offspring of a secret marriage between the Count de Saldaña and a sister of Alfonso the Chaste, at which the king was so much offended that he sent the Infanta to a convent, and kept the Count in perpetual imprisonment, educating Bernardo as his own son, and keeping him in ignorance of his birth. The achievements of Bernardo ending with the victory of Roncesvalles, his efforts to procure the release of his father, the falsehood of the king, and the despair and rebellion of Bernardo after the death of the Count in prison, constitute the romantic incidents of these ballads.
The next series is that on Fernan Gonzalez, a chieftain who, in the middle of the tenth century, recovered Castile from the Moors and became its first sovereign count. The most romantic are those which describe his being twice rescued from prison by his heroic wife, and his contest with King Sancho, in which he displayed all the turbulence and cunning of a robber baron of the Middle Ages.
The Seven Lords of Lara form the next group; some of them are beautiful, and the story they contain is one of the most romantic in Spanish history. The Seven Lords of Lara are betrayed by their uncle into the hands of the Moors, and put to death, while their father, by the basest treason, is confined in a Moorish prison. An eighth son, the famous Mudarra, whose mother is a noble Moorish lady, at last avenges all the wrongs of his race.
But from the earliest period, the Cid has been the occasion of more ballads than any other of the great heroes of Spanish history or fable. They were first collected in 1612, and have been continually republished to the present day. There are at least a hundred and sixty of them, forming a more complete series than any other, all strongly marked with the spirit of their age and country.
The Moorish ballads form a large and brilliant class by themselves. The period when this style of poetry came into favor was the century after the fall of Granada, when the south, with its refinement and effeminacy, its magnificent and fantastic architecture, the foreign yet not strange manners of its people, and the stories of their warlike achievements, all took strong hold of the Spanish imagination, and made of Granada a fairy land.
Of the ballads relating to private life, most of them are effusions of love, others are satirical, pastoral, and burlesque, and many descriptive of the manners and amusements of the people at large; but all of them are true representations of Spanish life. They are marked by an attractive simplicity of thought and expression, united to a sort of mischievous shrewdness. No such popular poetry exists in any other language, and no other exhibits in so great a degree that nationality which is the truest element of such poetry everywhere. The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, which gave to the poetry less dignity and elevation than belong to a people who, like the Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty, and which could not fail to raise the minds of those engaged in it far above the atmosphere that settled around the bloody feuds of rival barons, or the gross maraudings of border warfare. The great Castilian heroes, the Cid, Bernardo del Carpio, and Pelayo, are even now an essential portion of the faith and poetry of the common people of Spain, and are still honored as they were centuries ago. The stories of Guarinos and of the defeat at Roncesvalles are still sung by the wayfaring muleteers, as they were when Don Quixote heard them on his journey to Toboso, and the showmen still rehearse the same adventures in the streets of Seville, that they did at the solitary inn of Montesinos when he encountered them there.
3. THE CHRONICLES.—As the great Moorish contest was transferred to the south of Spain, the north became comparatively quiet. Wealth and leisure followed; the castles became the abodes of a crude but free hospitality, and the distinctions of society grew more apparent. The ballads from this time began to subside into the lower portions of society; the educated sought forms of literature more in accordance with their increased knowledge and leisure, and their more settled system of social life. The oldest of these forms was that of the Spanish prose chronicles, of which there are general and royal chronicles, chronicles of particular events, chronicles of particular persons, chronicles of travels, and romantic chronicles.