Renewed within my frame · its worn and wasted powers;
I deem the very odors would · have nourished me for hours.[33]
This induction, which is continued through forty stanzas more, of unequal merit, is little connected with the stories that follow; the stories, again, are not at all connected among themselves; and the whole ends abruptly with a few lines of homage to the Madonna. It is, therefore, inartificial in its structure throughout. But in the narrative parts there is often naturalness and spirit, and sometimes, though rarely, poetry. The tales themselves belong to the religious fictions of the Middle Ages, and were no doubt intended to excite devout feelings in those to whom they were addressed; but, like the old Mysteries, and much else that passed under the name of religion at the same period, they often betray a very doubtful morality.[34]
“The Miracles of the Virgin” is not only the longest, but the most curious, of the poems of Berceo. The rest, however, should not be entirely neglected. The poem on the “Signs which shall precede the Judgment” is often solemn, and once or twice rises to poetry; the story of María de Cisneros, in the “Life of San Domingo,” is well told, and so is that of the wild appearance in the heavens of Saint James and Saint Millan fighting for the Christians at the battle of Simancas, much as it is found in the “General Chronicle of Spain.” But perhaps nothing is more characteristic of the author or of his age than the spirit of childlike simplicity and religious tenderness that breathes through several parts of the “Mourning of the Madonna at the Cross,”—a spirit of gentle, faithful, credulous devotion, with which the Spanish people in their wars against the Moors were as naturally marked as they were with the ignorance that belonged to the Christian world generally in those dark and troubled times.[35]
I cannot pass farther without offering the tribute of my homage to two persons who have done more than any others in the nineteenth century to make Spanish literature known, and to obtain for it the honors to which it is entitled beyond the limits of the country that gave it birth.
The first of them, and one whose name I have already cited, is Friedrich Bouterwek, who was born at Oker in the kingdom of Hanover, in 1766, and passed nearly all the more active portion of his life at Göttingen, where he died in 1828, widely respected as one of the most distinguished professors of that long favored University. A project for preparing by the most competent hands a full history of the arts and sciences from the period of their revival in modern Europe was first suggested at Göttingen by another of its well-known professors, John Gottfried Eichhorn, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. But though that remarkable scholar published, in 1796-9, two volumes of a learned Introduction to the whole work which he had projected, he went no farther, and most of his coadjutors stopped when he did, or soon afterwards. The portion of it assigned to Bouterwek, however, which was the entire history of elegant literature in modern times, was happily achieved by him between 1801 and 1819, in twelve volumes octavo. Of this division, “The History of Spanish Literature” fills the third volume, and was published in 1804;—a work remarkable for its general philosophical views, and by far the best extant on the subject it discusses; but imperfect in many particulars, because its author was unable to procure a large number of Spanish books needful for his task, and knew many considerable Spanish authors only by insufficient extracts. In 1812, a translation of it into French was printed, in two volumes, by Madame Streck, with a judicious preface by the venerable M. Stapfer;—in 1823, it came out, together with its author’s brief “History of Portuguese Literature,” in an English translation, made with taste and skill, by Miss Thomasina Ross;—and in 1829, a Spanish version of the first and smallest part of it, with important notes, sufficient with the text to fill a volume in octavo, was prepared by two excellent Spanish scholars, José Gomez de la Cortina, and Nicolás Hugalde y Mollinedo,—a work which all lovers of Spanish literature would gladly see completed.
Since the time of Bouterwek, no foreigner has done so much to promote a knowledge of Spanish literature as M. Simonde de Sismondi, who was born at Geneva in 1773, and died there in 1842, honored and loved by all who knew his wise and generous spirit, as it exhibited itself either in his personal intercourse, or in his great works on the history of France and Italy,—two countries, to which, by a line of time-honored ancestors, he seemed almost equally to belong. In 1811, he delivered in his native city a course of brilliant lectures on the literature of the South of Europe, and in 1813, published them at Paris. They involved an account of the Provençal and the Portuguese, as well as of the Italian and the Spanish;—but in whatever relates to the Spanish Sismondi was even less well provided with the original authors than Bouterwek had been, and was, in consequence, under obligations to his predecessor, which, while he takes no pains to conceal them, diminish the authority of a work that will yet always be read for the beauty of its style and the richness and wisdom of its reflections. The entire series of these lectures was translated into German by L. Hain in 1815, and into English with notes by T. Roscoe in 1823. The part relating to Spanish literature was published in Spanish, with occasional alterations and copious and important additions by José Lorenzo Figueroa and José Amador de los Rios, at Seville, in 2 vols. 8vo, 1841-2,—the notes relating to Andalusian authors being particularly valuable.
None but those who have gone over the whole ground occupied by Spanish literature can know how great are the merits of scholars like Bouterwek and Sismondi,—acute, philosophical, and thoughtful,—who, with an apparatus of authors so incomplete, have yet done so much for the illustration of their subject.