From the proverb’s old strains:—
“‘If, when but a child,
Love’s power you own,
Pray, what will you do
When you older are grown?’”[225]
A single specimen like this, however, can give no idea of the great variety in the class of ballads to which it belongs, nor of their poetical beauty. To feel their true value and power, we must read large numbers of them, and read them, too, in their native language; for there is a winning freshness in the originals, as they lie imbedded in the old Romanceros, that escapes in translations, however free or however strict;—a remark that should be extended to the historical as well as the miscellaneous portions of that great mass of popular poetry which is found in the early ballad-books, and which, though it is all nearly three centuries old, and some of it older, has been much less carefully considered than it deserves to be.
Yet there are certainly few portions of the literature of any country that will better reward a spirit of adventurous inquiry than these ancient Spanish ballads, in all their forms. In many respects, they are unlike the earliest narrative poetry of any other part of the world; in some, they are better. The English and Scotch ballads, with which they may most naturally be compared, belong to a ruder state of society, where a personal coarseness and violence prevailed, which did not, indeed, prevent the poetry it produced from being full of energy, and sometimes of tenderness, but which necessarily had less dignity and elevation than belong to the character, if not the condition, of a people who, like the Spanish, were for centuries engaged in a contest ennobled by a sense of religion and loyalty; a contest which could not fail sometimes to raise the minds and thoughts of those engaged in it far above such an atmosphere as settled round the bloody feuds of rival barons or the gross maraudings of a border warfare. The truth of this will at once be felt, if we compare the striking series of ballads on Robin Hood with those on the Cid and Bernardo del Carpio; or if we compare the deep tragedy of Edom o’ Gordon with that of the Conde Alarcos; or what would be better than either, if we would sit down to the “Romancero General,” with its poetical confusion of Moorish splendors and Christian loyalty, just when we have come fresh from Percy’s “Reliques,” or Scott’s “Minstrelsy.”[226]
But, besides what the Spanish ballads possess different from the popular poetry of the rest of Europe, they exhibit, as no others exhibit it, that nationality which is the truest element of such poetry everywhere. They seem, indeed, as we read them, to be often little more than the great traits of the old Spanish character brought out by the force of poetical enthusiasm; so that, if their nationality were taken away from them, they would cease to exist. This, in its turn, has preserved them down to the present day, and will continue to preserve them hereafter. The great Castilian heroes, such as the Cid, Bernardo del Carpio, and Pelayo, are even now an essential portion of the faith and poetry of the common people of Spain; and are still, in some degree, honored as they were honored in the age of the Great Captain, or, farther back, in that of Saint Ferdinand. The stories of Guarinos, too, and of the defeat of Roncesvalles are still sung by the wayfaring muleteers, as they were when Don Quixote heard them in his journeying to Toboso; and the showmen still rehearse the adventures of Gayferos and Melisendra, in the streets of Seville, as they did at the solitary inn of Montesinos, when he encountered them there. In short, the ancient Spanish ballads are so truly national in their spirit, that they became at once identified with the popular character that had produced them, and with that same character will go onward, we doubt not, till the Spanish people shall cease to have a separate and independent existence.[227]