CHAPTER XXXII.
Ballad Poetry cultivated: Sepúlveda, Fuentes, Timoneda, Padilla, Cueva, Hita, Hidalgo, Valdivielso, Lope de Vega, Arellano, Roca y Serna, Esquilache, Mendoza, Quevedo. — Romanceros of more Popular Ballads: The Twelve Peers, the Cid, and others. — Great Number of Writers of Ballads.
The collection and publication of the popular ballads of the country in the Cancioneros and Romanceros, in the sixteenth century, attracted to them a kind and degree of attention they had failed to receive during the long period in which they had been floating about among the unrecorded traditions of the common people. There was so much that was beautiful in them, so much that appealed successfully to the best recollections of all classes, so much directly connected with the great periods of the national glory, that the minds of all were stirred by them, as soon as they appeared in a permanent form, and they became, at once, favorites of the more cultivated portion of the people, as they had always been of the humble hearts that gave them birth. The natural consequence followed;—they were imitated;—and not merely by poets who occasionally wrote in this among other forms of verse, but by persons who composed them in large numbers and published them by volumes.[34]
The first of these persons was Lorenzo de Sepúlveda, whose Ballad-book can be traced back to 1551, the very year after the appearance, at Saragossa, of the earliest collection of popular and anonymous ballads, gathered from the memories of the people. The attempt of Sepúlveda was made in the right direction; for he founded it almost entirely on the old Castilian Chronicles, and appealed, as they did, to popular tradition and the national feelings for his support. In his Preface, he says, that his ballads “ought to be more savory than many others, because not only are they true and drawn from the truest histories he could find, but written in the Castilian measure and in the tone of the old ballads, which,” he adds, “is now in fashion. They were taken,” he declares, “literally from the Chronicle which was compiled by the most serene king Don Alfonso; the same who, for his good letters and royal desires, and great learning in all branches of knowledge, was called ‘The Wise.’” In fact, more than three fourths of this curious volume consist of ballads taken from the “General Chronicle of Spain,” often employing its very words, and always imbued with its spirit. The rest is made up chiefly of ballads founded on sacred and ancient history, or on mythological and other stories of an imaginary nature.
But, unfortunately, Sepúlveda was not truly a poet, and therefore, though he sought his subjects in good sources and seldom failed to select them well, he yet failed to give any more of a poetical coloring to his ballads than he found in the old chronicles he followed. He was, however, successful as far as the general favor was concerned; for not only was his entire work reprinted at least four times, but the separate ballads in it constantly reappear in the old collections[35] that were, from time to time, published to meet the popular demand.
Quite as characteristic of the period is a small selection of ballads printed for the first time in 1564. It was made by some person of distinction, who sent it to Alonso de Fuentes, with a request that he would furnish it with all needful explanations in prose. This he did; but the original collector died before it was published. Of the forty ballads of which it consists, ten are on subjects from the Bible; ten from Roman history; ten from other portions of ancient history; and the remainder from the history of Spain, coming down to the fall of Granada. We are not told where they were obtained, and none of them has much value;—the great merit of the whole, in the eyes of those who were concerned in their publication, consisting, no doubt, in the wearisome historical and moral commentary by which each is followed.
Fuentes, however, who intimates that the task was hardly worthy of his position, may have had a better taste in such things than the person who employed him; for, in a prefatory epistle, he gives us, of his own accord, the following ballad, evidently very old, if not very spirited, which he attributes to Alfonso the Wise. But it is no otherwise the work of that monarch than that all but the last stanzas are taken from the remarkable letter he wrote on the disastrous position of his affairs in 1280, when, by the rebellion of his son and the desertion of the higher ecclesiastics of his kingdom, he was reduced, in his old age, to misery and despair,—a letter already cited, and more poetical than the ballad founded on it.
I left my land, I left my home,
To serve my God against his foes;
Nor deemed, that, in so short a space,