Many of the laws concerning knights, like one on their loyalty, and one on the meaning of the ceremonies used when they are armed,[74] and all the laws on the establishment and conduct of great public schools, which he was endeavouring, at the same time, to encourage, by the privileges he granted to Salamanca,[75] are written with even more skill and selectness of idiom. Indeed, the Partidas, in whatever relates to manner and style, are not only superior to any thing that had preceded them, but to any thing that for a long time followed. The poems of Berceo, hardly twenty years older, seem to belong to another age, and to a much ruder state of society; and, on the other hand, Marina, whose opinion on such a subject few are entitled to call in question, says, that, during the two or even three centuries subsequent, nothing was produced in Spanish prose equal to the Partidas for purity and elevation of style.[76]
But however this may be, there is no doubt, that, mingled with something of the rudeness and more of the ungraceful repetitions common in the period to which they belong, there is a richness, an appropriateness, and sometimes even an elegance, in their turns of expression, truly remarkable. They show that the great effort of their author to make the Castilian the living and real language of his country, by making it that of the laws and the tribunals of justice, had been successful, or was destined speedily to become so. Their grave and measured movement, and the solemnity of their tone, which have remained among the characteristics of Spanish prose ever since, show this success beyond all reasonable question. They show, too, the character of Alfonso himself, giving token of a far-reaching wisdom and philosophy, and proving how much a single great mind happily placed can do towards imparting their final direction to the language and literature of a country, even so early as the first century of their separate existence.[77]
CHAPTER IV.
Juan Lorenzo Segura. — Confusion of Ancient and Modern Manners. — El Alexandro, its Story and Merits. — Los Votos del Pavon. — Sancho el Bravo. — Don Juan Manuel, his Life and Works, published and unpublished. — His Conde Lucanor.
The proof that the “Partidas” were in advance of their age, both as to style and language, is plain, not only from the examination we have made of what preceded them, but from a comparison of them, which we must now make, with the poetry of Juan Lorenzo Segura, who lived at the time they were compiled, and probably somewhat later. Like Berceo, he was a secular priest, and he belonged to Astorga; but this is all we know of him, except that he lived in the latter part of the thirteenth century, and has left a poem of above ten thousand lines on the life of Alexander the Great, drawn from such sources as were then accessible to a Spanish ecclesiastic, and written in the four-line stanza used by Berceo.[78]
What is most obvious in this long poem is its confounding the manners of a well-known age of Grecian antiquity with those of the Catholic religion, and of knighthood, as they existed in the days of its author. Similar confusion is found in some portion of the early literature of every country in modern Europe. In all, there was a period when the striking facts of ancient history, and the picturesque fictions of ancient fable, floating about among the traditions of the Middle Ages, were seized upon as materials for poetry and romance; and when, to fill up and finish the picture presented by their imaginations to those who thus misapplied an imperfect knowledge of antiquity, the manners and feelings of their own times were incongruously thrown in, either from an ignorant persuasion that none other had ever existed, or from a wilful carelessness concerning every thing but poetical effect. This was the case in Italy, from the first dawning of letters till after the time of Dante; the sublime and tender poetry of whose “Divina Commedia” is full of such absurdities and anachronisms. It was the case, too, in France; examples singularly in point being found in the Latin poem of Walter de Chatillon, and the French one by Alexandre de Paris, on this same subject of Alexander the Great; both of which were written nearly a century before Juan Lorenzo lived, and both of which were used by him.[79] And it was the case in England, till after the time of Shakspeare, whose “Midsummer Night’s Dream” does all that genius can do to justify it. We must not, therefore, be surprised to find it in Spain, where, derived from such monstrous repositories of fiction as the works of Dares Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, Guido de Colonna and Walter de Chatillon, some of the histories and fancies of ancient times already filled the thoughts of those men who were unconsciously beginning the fabric of their country’s literature on foundations essentially different.
Among the most attractive subjects that offered themselves to such persons was that of Alexander the Great. The East—Persia, Arabia, and India—had long been full of stories of his adventures;[80] and now, in the West, as a hero more nearly approaching the spirit of knighthood than any other of antiquity, he was adopted into the poetical fictions of almost every nation that could boast the beginning of a literature, so that the Monk in the “Canterbury Tales” said truly,—
“The storie of Alexandre is so commune,
That every wight, that hath discretion,