Difficulties of its prosody.
When we pass from comparisons of general scheme and spirit to those of metrical form, the matter presents greater puzzles. As observed above, the earliest French chansons known to us are written in a strict syllabic metre, with a regular cæsura, and arranged in distinct though not uniformly long laisses, each tipped with an identical assonance. Further, it so happens that this very assonance is one of the best known characteristics of Spanish poetry, which is the only body of verse except old French to show it in any great volume or variety. The Spanish ballads are uniformly written in trochaic octosyllables (capable of reduction or extension to six, seven, or nine), regularly assonanced in the second and fourth line, but not necessarily showing either rhyme or assonance in the first and third. This measure became so popular that the great dramatists adopted it, and as it thus figures in the two most excellent productions of the literature, ballad and drama, it has become practically identified in the general mind with Spanish poetry, and not so very long ago might have been described by persons, not exactly ignorant, as peculiar to it.
Ballad-metre theory.
But when we turn to the Poema del Cid we find nothing like this. It is true that its latest and most learned student, Professor Cornu of Prague,[195] has, I believe, persuaded himself that he has discovered the basis of its metre to be the ballad octosyllables, full or catalectic, arranged as hemistichs of a longer line, and that he has been able to point out some hundreds of tolerably perfect verses of the kind. But this hypothesis necessitates our granting that it was possible for the copyists, or the line of copyists, of the unique MS. in the vast majority of cases to mistake a measure so simple, so universally natural, and, as history shows, so peculiarly grateful to the Spanish ear, and to change it into something quite different.
Irregularity of line.
For there is no question but that at first sight, and not at first sight only, the Poema del Cid seems to be the most irregular production of its kind that can claim high rank in the poetry of Europe. It is not merely that it is "rough," as its great northern congener the Nibelungenlied is usually said to be, or that its lines vary in length from ten syllables to over twenty, as some lines of Anglo-Saxon verse do. It is that there is nothing like the regular cadence of the one, or (at least as yet discovered) the combined system of accent and alliteration which accounts for the other. Almost the only single feature which is invariable is the break in the middle of the line, which is much more than a mere cæsura, and coincides not merely with the end of a word, but with a distinct stop or at least pause in sense. Beyond this, except by the rather violent hypothesis of copyist misdeeds above referred to,[196] nobody has been able to get further in a generalisation of the metre than that the normal form is an eight and six (better a seven and seven) "fourteener," trochaically cadenced, but admitting contraction and extension with a liberality elsewhere unparalleled.
And the ends of the verses are as troublesome as their bodies. Not only is there no absolute system either of assonance or of rhyme; not only does the consideration that at a certain stage assonance and consonance[197] meet and blend help us little; but it is almost or quite impossible to discern any one system on which the one or the other, or both, can be thought to have been used. Sometimes, indeed frequently, something like the French laisses or continuous blocks of end-sound appear: sometimes the eye feels inclined to see quatrains—a form, as we shall see, agreeable to early Spain, and very common in all European nations at this stage of their development. But it is very seldom that either is clearly demonstrable except in parts, while neither maintains itself for long. Generally the pages present the spectacle of an intensely irregular mosaic, or rather conglomerate, of small blocks of assonance or consonance put together on no discoverable system whatever. It is, of course, fair to remember that Anglo-Saxon verse—now, according to the orthodox, to be ranked among the strictest prosodic kinds—was long thought to be as formless as this. But after the thorough ransacking and overhauling which almost all mediæval literature has had during the last century, it is certainly strange that the underlying system in the Spanish case, if it exists, should not have been discovered, or should have been discovered only by such an Alexandrine cutting of the knot as the supposition that the copyist has made "pie" of about seventy per cent at least of the whole.
Still the form, puzzling as it is, is extremely interesting, and very satisfactory to those who can be content with unsystematic enjoyment. The recurrent wave-sound which has been noted in the chansons is at least as noticeable, though less regular, here. Let us, for instance, open the poem in the double-columned edition of 1842 at random, and take the passage on the opening, pp. 66, 67, giving the best part of two hundred lines, from 3491 to 3641. The eye is first struck with the constant repetition of catch-endings—"Infantes de Carrion," "los del Campeador"—each of which occurs at a line-end some dozen times in the two pages. The second and still more striking thing is that almost all this long stretch of verse, though not in one single laisse, is carried upon an assonance in o, either plump (Infanzon, cort, Carrion, &c.), which continues with a break or two for at least fifty lines, or with another vowel in double assonance (taiadores, tendones, varones). But this sequence is broken incomprehensibly by such end-words as tomar; and the length of the lines defies all classification, though one suspects some confusion of arrangement. For instance, it is not clear why
"Colada e Tizon que non lidiasen con ellas los del Campeador"
should be printed as one line, and