However incomplete the romance may seem to us, to the Spaniard it is dear. When romances were not being well written in Spain, it was because nothing was being written well. The metre not only held its ground against the court poetry of the fifteenth century, but prevailed against the new Italian influence. Here as in other fields the Spaniard was very tenacious of the things of Spain. To find a parallel to what happened in Spain we must do more than suppose that the Pléiade in France, or Spenser and his successors in England, had failed to overcome the already existing literary schools. It was as if the ballad metres had won a place even on the stage. No Spanish Sir Philip Sidney need have apologised for feeling his heart stirred by those ballads of the Cid, or of the Infantes de Lara, which answer to our Chevy Chase. They were strenuously collected, and constantly imitated, all through the sixteenth and well into the seventeenth century. |The Romanceros| So far were they from falling into neglect, that they were first able to shake the slowly withering poetry of the troubadour school, and then to fill a long series of collections, known, in the beginning, as Cancioneros, or Libros, or Sylvas de Romances, but finally as Romanceros. Much bibliographical learning and controversy has collected about these early editions. Even if I could profess to be competent to speak on such matters, they would have no proper place here. From the point of view of the literary historian, the interesting fact is that at a time when classic, or at least new influences, born of the Renaissance, were carrying all before them in France and England, and in Italy had long ago definitively conquered, the Spaniards did not wholly part with their inheritance from the Middle Ages.
The few ballads, and fragments of ballads, printed by Hernan del Castillo in 1511, proved so popular that an editor was tempted to form a special collection. The place and date of this first ballad-book proper are both significant.[1] It appeared at Antwerp in or about 1546—that is to say, three years or so after the first edition of the poems of Boscan and Garcilaso. The editor was one Martin Nucio. Antwerp, be it observed, was always a great publishing place for Spanish books, a fact which may be accounted for, not only by the political connection between Spain and the Low Countries, the number of Spaniards employed there in various capacities, as soldiers, officials, or traders, and the then extensive use of their language, but also by the superiority of the Flemish printers. That same carelessness of form which is found in the Spaniard’s literature followed him in lesser arts, where neatness of handling was more necessary than spirit and creative faculty. He was, at any rate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rarely a good engraver, and hardly ever a good printer. The Cancionero de Romances, brought out, it may be, primarily for the pleasure of the Spaniards scattered over Flanders and Germany, was soon reprinted in Spain, by one Estéban de Najera, at Saragossa. These contemporary collections are not quite identical, but essentially the same. This Cancionero, or Sylva, de Romances met with a reception which proved how strong a hold his indigenous verse had on the Spaniard. Three editions, with corrections and additions, appeared by 1555. The latest of these was not reprinted until well into the next century. In the meantime other editors had followed Nucio and Najera. A Romancero in nine parts appeared at places so far distant from one another as Valencia, Burgos, Toledo, Alcalá, and Madrid, between 1593 and 1597. This again grew into the great Romancero General of 1604-1614, wherein there are a thousand ballads.
The quality of this poetry.
In so far as this great mass of verse is really an inheritance from the Middle Ages, it does not belong to the subject of this book. All that it is necessary to do here is to note the fact that it did survive, and did continue to exert an influence. But nothing is more doubtful than the antiquity of the vast majority of the romances. The best judges have given up the attempt to class them by age, and indeed that must needs be a hopeless task where poems have been preserved by oral tradition alone, and have therefore been subject to modification by every succeeding generation. The presence of very ancient words is no proof of antiquity, since they may be put in by an imitator. Neither is the mention of comparatively recent events, or of such things as clocks or articles of commerce only known in later times, of itself proof that the framework of the ballad was not ancient when it took its final shape. The Romances were collected very much in the style of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and we all know with what facility remains of popular poetry are found when there is a demand for them, when no critical tests are applied, and when the searchers are endowed with a faculty for verse-writing. The Moorish ballads have been called old, and yet nothing is more certain than that they were the fruits of a literary fashion of the later sixteenth century. The Moor, like the Red Man, became a picturesque figure only when he ceased to be dangerous. Another class of the ballads, those called of chivalry, are full of references showing that the writers were acquainted with Ariosto, and cannot have been written before the middle of the century at the earliest. Where the romance is identical in subject with, and very similar in language to, a passage in the great chronicle of Alfonso the Wise, or other unquestionably mediæval work preserved in writing of known antiquity, it may be accepted as ancient. Where that test cannot be applied, it is safer not to think that the ballad is older than the sixteenth century. In some cases the inspiration can be shown to have been French. The subject of the Molinero de Arcos, a popular ballad existing in several versions, was taken from a well-known French farce, Le Meunier d’Arleux.
It is very necessary, when judging this great body of verse, to stand on our guard against certain besetting fallacies. There is always a marked tendency in collectors to excuse what is grotesque on the ground that it is ancient, and to pardon what is bad on the ground that it is popular. The Spanish ballads have suffered from the too great zeal with which modern editors have reprinted what was accepted by the indiscriminate taste of first collectors. Many of the ballads belong to the class of romances de ciegos—i.e., “blindmen’s ballads”—which were doggerel at all times. Others are not above the level of the poets’ corner of not over-exacting newspapers. Even in the best, the intention and the first inspiration are commonly far better than the expression. The Spaniard’s slovenliness of form is found here as elsewhere. Lockhart, in the preface to his adaptations, has rebuked the Spaniards for “neglecting old and simpler poets,” who wrote the romances, in favour of authors “who were at the best ingenious imitators of classical or Italian models.” He has himself, however, subjected those he selected for translation into English to a treatment which conveys a severe and a just critical judgment. A comparison between his ballads and the originals will show that he occasionally, though very rarely, weakened a forcible phrase. Now and again there are signs that his knowledge of Spanish was not deep. He writes, “So spake the brave Montanez,” as if that had been the name of the Lord of Butrago, whereas montanes (mountaineer) was a common old Spanish equivalent for noble, a custom due to the belief that the old Castilian aristocracy drew its “blue blood,” shown by its grey or blue eyes, from the Visigoths, who held the mountains of Asturias against the Moors. The Lord of Butrago was a historical personage, and the head of the house of Mendoza. But if a few faults of this kind can be found, there are to be set off against them a hundred passages in which he has suppressed a redundancy or replaced the purely prosaic original by poetry. A very good test case is to be found in the last verse of the Wandering Knight’s song—which stands thus in Lockhart:—
“I ride from land to land,
I sail from sea to sea;
Some day more kind I fate may find,
Some night kiss thee.”