A vassal’s daughter sits by thee,
And not a royal bride![216]
Alfonso the Sixth succeeded on the death of Sancho, who perished miserably by treason before the walls of Zamora; but the Cid quarrelled with his new master, and was exiled. At this moment begins the old poem already mentioned; but even here and afterwards the ballads form a more continuous account of his life, carrying us, often with great minuteness of detail, through his conquest of Valencia, his restoration to the king’s favor, his triumph over the Counts of Carrion, his old age, death, and burial, and giving us, when taken together, what Müller the historian and Herder the philosopher consider, in its main circumstances, a trustworthy history, but what can hardly be more than a poetical version of traditions current at the different times when its different portions were composed.
Indeed, in the earlier part of the period when historical ballads were written, their subjects seem rather to have been chosen among the traditional heroes of the country, than among the known and ascertained events in its annals. Much fiction, of course, was mingled with whatever related to such personages by the willing credulity of patriotism, and portions of the ballads about them are incredible to any modern faith; so that we can hardly fail to agree with the good sense of the canon in Don Quixote, when he says, “There is no doubt there was such a man as the Cid and such a man as Bernardo del Carpio, but much doubt whether they achieved what is imputed to them”;[217] while, at the same time, we must admit there is no less truth in the shrewd intimation of Sancho, that, after all, the old ballads are too old to tell lies. At least, some of them are so.
At a later period, all sorts of subjects were introduced into the ballads; ancient subjects as well as modern, sacred as well as profane. Even the Greek and Roman fables were laid under contribution, as if they were historically true; but more ballads are connected with Spanish history than with any other, and, in general, they are better. The most striking peculiarity of the whole mass is, perhaps, to be found in the degree in which it expresses the national character. Loyalty is constantly prominent. The Lord of Buitrago sacrifices his own life to save that of his sovereign.[218] The Cid sends rich spoils from his conquests in Valencia to the ungrateful king who had driven him thither as an exile.[219] Bernardo del Carpio bows in submission to the uncle who basely and brutally outrages his filial affections;[220] and when, driven to despair, he rebels, the ballads and the chronicles absolutely forsake him. In short, this and the other strong traits of the national character are constantly appearing in the old historical ballads, and constitute a chief part of the peculiar charm that invests them.
Ballads on Moorish Subjects.—The Moorish ballads form a brilliant and large class by themselves, but none of them are as old as the earliest historical ballads. Indeed, their very subjects intimate their later origin. Few can be found alluding to known events or personages that occur before the period immediately preceding the fall of Granada; and even in these few the proofs of a more recent and Christian character are abundant. The truth appears to be, that, after the final overthrow of the Moorish power, when the conquerors for the first time came into full possession of whatever was most luxurious in the civilization of their enemies, the tempting subjects their situation suggested were at once seized upon by the spirit of their popular poetry. The sweet South, with its picturesque, though effeminate, refinement; the foreign, yet not absolutely stranger, manners of its people; its magnificent and fantastic architecture; the stories of the warlike achievements and disasters at Baza, at Ronda, and at Alhama, with the romantic adventures and fierce feuds of the Zegris and Abencerrages, the Gomeles and the Aliatares;—all took strong hold of the Spanish imagination, and made of Granada, its rich plain and snowcapped mountains, that fairy land which the elder and sterner ballad poetry of the North had failed to create. From this time, therefore, we find a new class of subjects, such as the loves of Gazul and Abindarraez, with games and tournaments in the Bivarrambla, and tales of Arabian nights in the Generalife; in short, whatever was matter of Moorish tradition or manners, or might by the popular imagination be deemed such, was wrought into Spanish ballad poetry, until the very excess became ridiculous, and the ballads themselves laughed at one another for deserting their own proper subjects, and becoming, as it were, renegades to nationality and patriotism.[221]
The period when this style of poetry came into favor was the century that elapsed after the fall of Granada; the same in which all classes of the ballads were first written down and printed. The early collections give full proof of this. Those of 1511 and 1550 contain several Moorish ballads, and that of 1593 contains above two hundred. But though their subjects involve known occurrences, they are hardly ever really historical; as, for instance, the well-known ballad on the tournament in Toledo, which is supposed to have happened before the year 1085, while its names belong to the period immediately preceding the fall of Granada; and the ballad of King Belchite, which, like many others, has a subject purely imaginary. Indeed, this romantic character is the prevalent one in the ballads of this class, and gives them much of their interest; a fact well illustrated by that beginning “The star of Venus rises now,” which is one of the best and most consistent in the “Romancero General,” and yet, by its allusions to Venus and to Rodamonte, and its mistake in supposing a Moor to have been Alcayde of Seville, a century after Seville had become a Christian city, shows that there was, in its composition, no serious thought of any thing but poetical effect.[222]
These, with some of the ballads on the famous Gazul, occur in the popular story of the “Wars of Granada,” where they are treated as if contemporary with the facts they record, and are beautiful specimens of the poetry which the Spanish imagination delighted to connect with that most glorious event in the national history.[223] Others can be found in a similar tone on the stories, partly or wholly fabulous, of Muça, Xarifé, Lisaro, and Tarfé; while yet others, in greater number, belong to the treasons and rivalries, the plots and adventures, of the more famous Zegris and Abencerrages, which, as far as they are founded in fact, show how internal dissensions, no less than external disasters, prepared the way for the final overthrow of the Moorish empire. Some of them were probably written in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella; many more in the time of Charles the Fifth; the most brilliant, but not the best, somewhat later.
Ballads on Manners and Private Life.—But the ballad poetry of Spain was not confined to heroic subjects drawn from romance or history, or to subjects depending on Moorish traditions and manners; and therefore, though these are the three largest classes into which it is divided, there is yet a fourth, which may be called miscellaneous, and which is of no little moment. For, in truth, the poetical feelings even of the lower portions of the Spanish people were spread out over more subjects than we should anticipate; and their genius, which, from the first, had a charter as free as the wind, has thus left us a vast number of records, that prove at least the variety of the popular perceptions, and the quickness and tenderness of the popular sensibility. Many of the miscellaneous ballads thus produced—perhaps most of them—are effusions of love; but many are pastoral, many are burlesque, satirical, and picaresque; many are called Letrillas, but have nothing epistolary about them except the name; many are lyrical in their tone, if not in their form; and many are descriptive of the manners and amusements of the people at large. But one characteristic runs through the whole of them. They are true representations of Spanish life. Some of those first printed have already been referred to; but there is a considerable class marked by an attractive simplicity of thought and expression, united to a sort of mischievous shrewdness, that should be particularly noticed. No such popular poetry exists in any other language. A number of these ballads occur in the peculiarly valuable Sixth Part of the Romancero, that appeared in 1594, and was gathered by Pedro Flores, as he himself tells us, in part least, from the memories of the common people.[224] They remind us not unfrequently of the lighter poetry of the Archpriest of Hita in the middle of the fourteenth century, and may, probably, be traced back in their tone and spirit to a yet earlier period. Indeed, they are quite a prominent and charming part of all the earliest Romanceros, not a few of them being as simple, and yet as shrewd and humorous, as the following, in which an elder sister is represented lecturing a younger one, on first noticing in her the symptoms of love:—
Her sister Miguela