This scene of the temptation, strange as it now seems to us, is, nevertheless, not an unfavorable specimen of the entire fiction. The allegory is almost everywhere quite as awkward and unmanageable as it is here, and often leads to equally painful and disgusting absurdities. On the other hand, we have occasionally proofs of an imagination that is not ungraceful; just as the formal and extravagant style in which it is written now and then gives token that its author was not insensible to the resources of a language he, in general, so much abuses.[394]
There is, no doubt, a wide space between such a fiction as this of the Celestial Chivalry and the comparatively simple and direct story of the Amadis de Gaula; and when we recollect that only half a century elapsed between the dates of these romances in Spain,[395] we shall be struck with the fact that this space was very quickly passed over, and that all the varieties of the romances of chivalry are crowded into a comparatively short period of time. But we must not forget that the success of these fictions, thus suddenly obtained, is spread afterwards over a much longer period. The earliest of them were familiarly known in Spain during the fifteenth century, the sixteenth is thronged with them, and, far into the seventeenth, they were still much read; so that their influence over the Spanish character extends through quite two hundred years. Their number, too, during the latter part of the time when they prevailed, was large. It exceeded seventy, nearly all of them in folio; each often in more than one volume, and still oftener repeated in successive editions;—circumstances which, at a period when books were comparatively rare and not frequently reprinted, show that their popularity must have been widely spread, as well as long continued.
This might, perhaps, have been, in some degree, expected in a country where the institutions and feelings of chivalry had struck such firm root as they had in Spain. For Spain, when the romances of chivalry first appeared, had long been peculiarly the land of knighthood. The Moorish wars, which had made every gentleman a soldier, necessarily tended to this result; and so did the free spirit of the communities, led on as they were, during the next period, by barons, who long continued almost as independent in their castles as the king was on his throne. Such a state of things, in fact, is to be recognized as far back as the thirteenth century, when the Partidas, by the most minute and painstaking legislation, provided for a condition of society not easily to be distinguished from that set forth in the Amadis or the Palmerin.[396] The poem and history of the Cid bear witness yet earlier, indirectly indeed, but very strongly, to a similar state of the country; and so do many of the old ballads and other records of the national feelings and traditions that had come from the fourteenth century.
But in the fifteenth, the chronicles are full of it, and exhibit it in forms the most grave and imposing. Dangerous tournaments, in some of which the chief men of the time, and even the kings themselves, took part, occur constantly, and are recorded among the important events of the age.[397] At the passage of arms near Orbigo, in the reign of John the Second, eighty knights, as we have seen, were found ready to risk their lives for as fantastic a fiction of gallantry as is recorded in any of the romances of chivalry; a folly, of which this was by no means the only instance.[398] Nor did they confine their extravagances to their own country. In the same reign, two Spanish knights went as far as Burgundy, professedly in search of adventures, which they strangely mingled with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; seeming to regard both as religious exercises.[399] And as late as the time of Ferdinand and Isabella, Fernando del Pulgar, their wise secretary, gives us the names of several distinguished noblemen personally known to himself, who had gone into foreign countries, “in order,” as he says, “to try the fortune of arms with any cavalier that might be pleased to adventure it with them, and so gain honor for themselves, and the fame of valiant and bold knights for the gentlemen of Castile.”[400]
A state of society like this was the natural result of the extraordinary development which the institutions of chivalry had then received in Spain. Some of it was suited to the age, and salutary; the rest was knight-errantry, and knight-errantry in its wildest extravagance. When, however, the imaginations of men were so excited as to tolerate and maintain, in their daily life, such manners and institutions as these, they would not fail to enjoy the boldest and most free representations of a corresponding state of society in works of romantic fiction. But they went farther. Extravagant and even impossible as are many of the adventures recorded in the books of chivalry, they still seemed so little to exceed the absurdities frequently witnessed or told of known and living men, that many persons took the romances themselves to be true histories, and believed them. Thus, Mexia, the trustworthy historiographer of Charles the Fifth, says, in 1545, when speaking of “the Amadises, Lisuartes, and Clarions,” that “their authors do waste their time and weary their faculties in writing such books, which are read by all and believed by many. For,” he goes on, “there be men who think all these things really happened, just as they read or hear them, though the greater part of the things themselves are sinful, profane, and unbecoming.”[401] And Castillo, another chronicler, tells us gravely, in 1587, that Philip the Second, when he married Mary of England, only forty years earlier, promised, that, if King Arthur should return to claim the throne, he would peaceably yield to that prince all his rights; thus implying, at least in Castillo himself, and probably in many of his readers, a full faith in the stories of Arthur and his Round Table.[402]
Such credulity, it is true, now seems impossible, even if we suppose it was confined to a moderate number of intelligent persons; and hardly less so, when, as in the admirable sketch of an easy faith in the stories of chivalry by the innkeeper and Maritornes in Don Quixote, we are shown that it extended to the mass of the people.[403] But before we refuse our assent to the statements of such faithful chroniclers as Mexia, on the ground that what they relate is impossible, we should recollect, that, in the age when they lived, men were in the habit of believing and asserting every day things no less incredible than those recited in the old romances. The Spanish Church then countenanced a trust in miracles, as of constant recurrence, which required of those who believed them more credulity than the fictions of chivalry; and yet how few were found wanting in faith! And how few doubted the tales that had come down to them of the impossible achievements of their fathers during the seven centuries of their warfare against the Moors, or the glorious traditions of all sorts, that still constitute the charm of their brave old chronicles, though we now see at a glance that many of them are as fabulous as any thing told of Palmerin or Launcelot!
But whatever we may think of this belief in the romances of chivalry, there is no question that in Spain, during the sixteenth century, there prevailed a passion for them such as was never known elsewhere. The proof of it comes to us from all sides. The poetry of the country is full of it, from the romantic ballads that still live in the memory of the people, up to the old plays that have ceased to be acted and the old epics that have ceased to be read. The national manners and the national dress, more peculiar and picturesque than in other countries, long bore its sure impress. The old laws, too, speak no less plainly. Indeed, the passion for such fictions was so strong, and seemed so dangerous, that in 1553 they were prohibited from being printed, sold, or read in the American colonies; and in 1555 the Cortes earnestly asked that the same prohibition might be extended to Spain itself, and that all the extant copies of romances of chivalry might be publicly burned.[404] And finally, half a century later, the happiest work of the greatest genius Spain has produced bears witness on every page to the prevalence of an absolute fanaticism for books of chivalry, and becomes at once the seal of their vast popularity and the monument of their fate.
CHAPTER XIII.
Fourth Class. — Drama. — Extinction of the Greek and Roman Theatres. — Religious Origin of the Modern Drama. — Earliest Notice of it in Spain. — Hints of it in the Fifteenth Century. — Marquis of Villena. — Constable de Luna. — Mingo Revulgo. — Rodrigo Cota. — The Celestina. — First Act. — The Remainder. — Its Story, Character, and Effects on Spanish Literature.