With Castilian—that is to say, Spanish proper—the case is very different. It cannot claim any great antiquity: and as is the case with Italian, and to a less degree with French also, the processes by which it came into existence out of Latin are hid from us to a degree surprising, even when we remember the political and social welter in which Europe lay between the fifth and the eleventh centuries. It is, of course, a most natural and constant consideration that the formation of literary languages was delayed in the Romance-speaking countries by the fact that everybody of any education at all had Latin ready to his hands. And the exceptional circumstances of Spain, which, after hardly settling down under the Visigothic conquest, was whelmed afresh by the Moorish invasion, have not been excessively insisted upon by the authorities who have dealt with the subject. But still it cannot but strike us as peculiar that the document—the famous Charter of Avilés,[194] which plays in the history of Spanish something like the same part which the Eulalia hymn and the Strasburg Oaths play in French—dates only from the middle of the twelfth century, more than three hundred years after the Strasburg interchange, and at a time when French was not merely a regularly constituted language, but already had no inconsiderable literature. It is true that the Avilés document is not quite so jargonish as the Strasburg, but the same mark—the presence of undigested Latin—appears in both.
It is, however, fair to remember that prose is almost invariably later than poetry, and that official prose of all periods has a tendency to the barbarous. If the Avilés charter be genuine, and of its assigned date, it does not follow that at the very same time poetry of a much less uncouth character was not being composed in Spanish. And as a matter of fact we have, independently of the ballads, the great Poema del Cid, which has sometimes been supposed to be of antiquity equal to this, and which can hardly be more than some fifty years later.
Ballads?
As to the ballads, what has been said about those in Portuguese must be repeated at somewhat greater length. There is no doubt at all that these ballads (which are well known even to English readers by the masterly paraphrases of Lockhart) are among the finest of their kind. They rank with, and perhaps above, the best of the Scottish poems of the same class. But we have practically, it would seem, no earlier authority for them than the great Cancioneros of the sixteenth century. It is, of course, said that the Cronica General (see post), which is three centuries earlier, was in part compiled from these ballads. But, in the first place, we do not know that this was the fact, or that the ballads were not compiled from the Chronicles, or from traditions which the Chronicles embodied. And in the second place, if the Chronicles were compiled from ballads, we do not know that these ballads, as pieces of finished literature and apart from their subjects, were anything at all like the ballads that we possess. This last consideration—an uncomfortable one, but one which the critic is bound to urge—at once disposes of, or reduces to a minimum, the value of the much-vaunted testimony of a Latin poem, said to date before the middle of the eleventh century, that "Roderic, called Mio Cid," was sung about. No doubt he was; and no doubt, as the expression Mio Cid is not a translation from the Arabic, but a quite evidently genuine vernacularity, he was sung of in those terms. But the testimony leaves us as much in doubt as ever about the age of the existing Cid ballads. And if this be the case about the Cid ballads, the subject of which did not die till hard upon the opening of the twelfth century itself, or about those concerning the Infantes of Lara, how much more must it be so with those that deal with such subjects as Bernardo del Carpio and the Charlemagne invasion, three hundred years earlier, when it is tolerably certain that there was nothing at all resembling what we now call Spanish? It seems sometimes to be thought that the antiquity of the subject of a ballad comports in some strange fashion the antiquity of the ballad itself; than which nothing can be much more disputable. Indeed the very metre of the ballads themselves—which, though simple, is by no means of a very primitive character, and represents the "rubbing down" of popular dialect and unscholarly prosody for a long time against the regular structure of Latin—disproves the extreme earliness of the poems in anything like their present form. The comparatively uncouth, though not lawless metres of early Teutonic poetry are in themselves warrants of their antiquity: the regularity, not strait-laced but unmistakable, of the Spanish ballads is at least a strong suggestion that they are not very early.
The Poema del Cid.
At any rate there is no sort of proof that they are early; and in this history it has been made a rule to demand proof, or at least the very strongest probability. If there be any force in the argument at the end of the last paragraph, it tells (unless, indeed, the latest critical hypothesis be adopted, of which more presently) as much in favour of the antiquity of the Poema del Cid as it tells against that of the ballads. This piece, which has come down to us in a mutilated condition, though it does not seem likely that its present length (3744 lines) has been very greatly affected by the mutilations, has been regarded as dating not earlier than the middle of the twelfth or later than the middle of the thirteenth century—that is to say, in the first case, within a lifetime of the events it professes to deal with; in the second, at scarcely more than two lifetimes from them. The historical personality of Ruy Diaz de Bivar, el Cid Campeador (?1040-1099), does not concern us, though it is perfectly well established in general by the testimony of his enemies, as well as by that of his countrymen, and is indeed almost unique in history as that of a national hero at once of history and of romance. The Roderic who regained what a Roderic had lost may have been—must have been, indeed—presented with many facts and achievements which he never performed, and there may be no small admixture of these in the Poema itself; but that does not matter at all to literature. It would not, strictly speaking, matter to literature if he had never existed. But not every one can live up to this severe standard in things literary; and it is undoubtedly a comfort to the natural man to know that the Cid certainly did exist, and that, to all but certainty, his blood runs in the veins of the Queen of England and of the Emperor of Austria, not to mention the King of Spain, to-day.
A Spanish chanson de geste.
But in the criticism of his poetical history this is in strictness irrelevant. It is unlucky for that criticism that Southey and Ticknor—the two best critics, not merely in English but in any language, who have dealt with Spanish literature—were quite unacquainted with the French chansons de geste; while of late, discussion of the Poema, as of other early Spanish literature, has been chiefly abandoned to philologists. No one familiar with these chansons (the greatest and oldest of which, the Chanson de Roland, was to all but a certainty in existence when Ruy Diaz was in his cradle, and a hundred years before the Poema was written) can fail to see in a moment that this latter is itself a chanson de geste. It was written much nearer to the facts than any one of its French analogues, except those of the Crusading cycle, and it therefore had at least the chance of sticking much closer to those facts. Nor is there much doubt that it does. We may give up as many as we please of its details; we may even, if, not pleasing, we choose to obey the historians, give up that famous and delightful episode of the Counts of Carrion, which indeed is not so much an episode as the main subject of the greater part of the poem. But—partly because of its nearness to the subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical, characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen of Corneille—the poem is far more alive than the not less heroic histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the Nibelungenlied, to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women—there the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception, perhaps, of Hagen, shadowy, compared not merely to Rodrigo himself, but to Bermuez and Muño Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya.
In scheme and spirit.
Still the chanson stamp is unmistakably on it from the very beginning, where the Cid, like three-fourths of the chanson heroes themselves, has experienced royal ingratitude, through the vaunts and the fighting, and the stock phrases (abaxan las lanzas following abrazan los escudos, and the like), to that second marriage connecting the Cid afresh with royalty, which is almost as common in the chansons as the initial ingratitude. It would be altogether astonishing if the chansons had not made their way, when French literature was making it everywhere, into the country nearest to France. In face of the Poema del Cid, it is quite certain that they had done so, and that here as elsewhere French literature performed its vigorous, and in a way self-sacrificing, function of teaching other nations to do better than their teacher.