What can be more pretty or more fit? but it is not in the Cancionero de Romances, where the words stand:—
“Andando de Sierra en Sierra
Por orillas de la mar,
Por provar si en mi ventura
Ay lugar donde avadar;
Pero por vos, mi señora,
Todo se ha de comportar.”
“Wandering from hills to hills by the shore of the sea, to try whether my fortune will give me a ford; but for you, my lady, all things are to be endured,” is the bald literal meaning, which, though it is at least as old as 1555, and is simple enough, is also, unfortunately, bathos. And this is very far from being a solitary example. The result is, that Lockhart’s ballads give an unduly high estimate of the originals to those who only know the English rifacimento. A reader who refuses to be enslaved by authority will find that he is constantly compelled to make allowances for the faults which Lockhart was in the fortunate position of being able to correct—for redundancies, for lines of mere prose, for vulgarities, for flat, spiritless endings. He will often feel that he is reading mere repetitions in a popular form, written by painfully uninspired authors, whose too frequent use of stock literary phrases shows that they were far from the simplicity attributed to the ballad-maker. It is true that poetic feeling, and some poetic matter in the shape of traditional stories, is to be found in the romances, but, as it were, in solution. Nor is it to be denied that it is to the honour of a people when it clings to a national form of verse, and to its own traditions. Yet neither good poetic intention nor the most respectable patriotism will make inferior execution anything but inferior even in national ballads. It is unquestionably unjust to find fault with a body of professedly unlearned writers because they show the defects of men who have not a severe literary training. But the claim made for the Spanish romances is that they express the natural feelings of a poetic people with simplicity: it is quite fair to answer that the great mass of them belong to a time of high literary cultivation; that they show signs of being the work of its inferior writers; that, even at their best, their loose metrical form—far looser as it is than our own ballad stanza—permitted them to be written by persons who could not have mastered even doggerel rhyme; and that they are too often wanting in the direct, simple, passionate expression by which the rudest genuine poet can force his way to the realm of poetry.
Spain and Italy.
It was a real, but in all probability an inevitable, misfortune that the best poetic faculty in Spain during the sixteenth century neglected the native metre, and turned for inspiration “to the sweet and stately measures of the Italian poesie.” An Italian influence, as has been already pointed out, was no new thing in Spain, and as the sixteenth century drew on it was sure to be felt again. Italy, indeed, was full of Spaniards. They were numerous at the papal Court, and the wars for Naples brought them in greatly increased numbers. Until the close of the fifteenth century those who settled in the southern kingdom were mainly drawn from Aragon. A great change came with the reign of Ferdinand the Catholic. He claimed Naples by right of his inherited crown of Aragon, but he fought for it with the forces, and the arms, of Castile. Isabel was tenacious of her rights as queen of the greater kingdom, but she was scrupulous in fulfilling her wifely duty to comfort her husband. She supported him with her own subjects. After her death he was regent, except for the short period during which he was displaced by his worthless son-in-law, Philip the Handsome. Thus the Castilians came more directly in contact with Italy and Italian civilisation than they had ever done before. They abounded as soldiers, as diplomatists, lay and ecclesiastical, and as administrators. Some among them were sure to feel the artistic and literary influences of that many-sided time. The way was prepared in Spain by the alliance between the crowns of Castile and Aragon, which could not give the country administrative unity, but did give an internal peace. It was a time of expansion and vigour. Isabel had favoured learning. Her favourite scholar, Antonio de Lebrija—better known by the Latinised form of his name as Nebrissensis—drew up a Castilian grammar and dictionary. The language came rapidly to maturity, and was in fact full grown at the beginning of the sixteenth century. This speedy maturity, though perhaps not for the good of the language in the end, was natural. Castilian, in spite of a large admixture of Arabic words, is so thoroughly Latin that little was needed to fit it for literary purposes when once the study of classical models was seriously begun—much as the art of printing came quickly to perfection because the early typographers had beautifully executed manuscripts before them as models.