History of Spanish Literature, vol. 3 (of 3)

by George Ticknor

And where he found it find my own.[36]

Juan de Timoneda, partly bookseller and partly poet,—the friend of Lope de Rueda, and, like him, the author of farces acted in the public squares of Valencia,—was, both from his occupations and tastes, a person who would naturally understand the general poetical feeling and wants of his time. In consequence of this, probably, he published, in 1573, a collection of ballads, entitled “The Rose,” consisting, in no small degree, of his own compositions, but containing, also, some by other and older poets. Taken together, they constitute a volume of nearly seven hundred pages, divided into “The Rose of Love”; “The Spanish Rose”; “The Gentile Rose,” so called, because its subjects are heathen; and “The Royal Rose,” which is on the fates and fortunes of princes;—the whole being followed by about a hundred pages of popular, miscellaneous verse, rustic songs, and fanciful glosses.

The best parts of this large collection are the ballads gathered by its author from popular tradition, most of which were soon published in other Romanceros, with the variations their origin necessarily involved. The poorest parts are those written by himself,—such as the last division, which is entirely his own, and is not superior to the similar ballads in Sepúlveda and Fuentes. As a collection, however, it is important; because it shows how true the Spanish people remained to their old traditions, and how constantly they claimed to have the best portions of their history repeated to them in the old forms to which they had so long been accustomed. In another point of view, also, it is of consequence. It furnishes ballads on the early heroes of Spain, some of which are needed to fill up two or three of the best among their traditional stories, while others come down, with similar accounts of later heroes, to the end of the Moorish wars.[37]

In 1583, the series of such popular works was still further continued by Pedro de Padilla, who published a Romancero containing sixty-three long ballads of his own,—about half of them taken from uncertain traditions, or from fables like those of Ariosto, and the others from the known history of Spain, which they follow down through the times of Charles the Fifth and the Flemish wars of Philip the Second. The Italian measures several times intrude, where they can produce only an awkward and incongruous effect; and the rest of the volume, not devoted to ballads,—except fifty villancicos, which are full of the old popular spirit,—is composed of poems in the Italian manner, that add nothing to its value.[38]

Juan de la Cueva, finding the old national subjects thus seized upon by his predecessors, resorted, it would seem, from necessity, to the histories of Greece and Rome for his materials, and in 1587 published a volume containing above a hundred ballads, which he divided into ten books, placing nine of them under the protection of the nine Muses, and the other under that of Apollo. Their poetical merit is inconsiderable. The best are a few whose subjects are drawn from the old Castilian Chronicle, like that on the sad story of Doña Teresa, who, after being wedded against her will to the Moorish king of Toledo, was miraculously permitted to take refuge in a convent, rather than consummate her hated marriage with an infidel. Two ballads, however, in which the author gives an account of himself and of his literary undertakings, are more curious;—the latter containing an amusing account of some of the bad poets of his time.[39]

The publication of the first part of “The Civil Wars of Granada,” by Hita, in 1595, containing about sixty ballads, some of them very old, and several of great poetical merit, increased, no doubt, the impulse which the frequent appearance of volumes of popular anonymous ballads continued to give to Spanish poetry in this attractive form.[40] This is yet more apparent in the new direction taken by ballad-writing, which from this time began to select particular subjects and address itself to separate classes of readers. Thus, in 1609, we have a volume of ballads in the dialect of the rogues, written in the very spirit of the vagabonds it represents, and collected by some one who concealed himself under the name of Juan Hidalgo;[41]—while in 1612, at the other extreme of the cycle, Valdivielso, the fashionable ecclesiastic, printed a large “Spiritual Ballad-book,” whose ballads are all on religious subjects, and all intended to promote habits of devotion.[42] In 1614 and 1622, Lope de Vega, always a lover of such poetry, gave to the religious world a collection of similar devout ballads, often reprinted afterwards;[43] and in 1629 and 1634, he contributed materials to two other collections of the same character,—the first anonymous, and entitled “A Bouquet of Divine Flowers”; and the other by Luis de Arellano, which, under the name of “Counsels for the Dying,” contains thirty ballads, several of which are by the principal poets of the time.[44]

Others, like Roca y Serna, wrote large numbers of ballads, but did not print them separately.[45] Those of the Prince Esquilache, some of which are excellent, amount to nearly three hundred. Antonio de Mendoza wrote about two hundred; and perhaps as many, in every possible variety of character, are scattered through the works of Quevedo; so that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, there can be no doubt that large and successful efforts had been made by the known authors of the period to continue the old ballad spirit by free contributions, both in separate volumes and in masses of ballads inserted among their other published works.

Meantime the old spirit itself had not been lost. The ballad-book known originally under the name of “Flor de Romances,” which we have already traced in its individual parts to five small volumes,—published between 1593 and 1597, in such widely different portions of Spain, that its materials were gathered from the soil of nearly the whole country,—continued to be valued, and was reprinted and enlarged, under the name of “El Romancero General,” four times; till, with the Ballad-book of 1550-1555, it comprehended nearly all the old ballads that had been preserved by tradition, together with not a few by Lope de Vega, Góngora, and other living authors. Out of these two vast storehouses, and from such other sources as could still yield suitable materials, smaller and more popular ballad-books were now selected and published. One appeared at Barcelona in 1582, and was reprinted there in 1602 and 1696, taken in a considerable degree from the collection of 1550, but containing, besides, ballads not found elsewhere, and among the rest, several on the history of the triple league and on the death of Philip the Second.[46] A ballad-book for “The Twelve Peers,” and their marvellous achievements, published for the first time in 1608, has continued to be a favorite ever since;[47] and four years afterwards appeared “The Ballad-Book of the Cid,” which has been printed and reprinted again and again, at home and abroad, down to our own times.[48] These were followed, in 1623, by the “Primavera,” or Spring of Ballads, by Perez, of which a second part was collected and published by Segura in 1629, comprehending together nearly three hundred;—most, but not all, of them known before, and many of them of great beauty.[49] And other ballad-books of the same sort, as well as these, continued to be printed in cheap forms for popular use till the old Castilian culture disappeared with the decay of the old national character.

But during the long period of a century and a half when this kind of poetry prevailed so widely in Spain, the ballads were not left to the formal Romanceros, whether anonymous, like the largest, or by known authors, like those of Sepúlveda and Cueva, nor even to persons who wrote them in great numbers and printed them in a separate department of their collected works, as did Prince Esquilache. On the contrary, between 1550 and 1700, hardly a Spanish poet can be found through whose works they are not scattered with such profusion, that the number of popular ballads that could be collected from them would, if brought together, greatly exceed in amount all that are found in the ballad-books proper. Many of the ballads which thus occur either separately or in small groups are picturesque and beautiful in the same way the elder ones are, though rarely to the same degree. Silvestre, Montemayor, Espinel, Castillejo, and, above all of his time, Lopez de Maldonado, wrote them with success, towards the end of the sixteenth century.[50] A little later, those of Góngora are admirable. Indeed, his more simple, childlike ballads, and those in which a gay, mischievous spirit is made to conceal a genuine tenderness, are unlike almost any of their class found elsewhere, and can hardly be surpassed.[51] But Góngora afterwards introduced the same affected and false style into this form of his poetry that he did into the rest, and was followed, with constantly increasing absurdities, by Arteaga, Pantaleon, Villamediana, Coronel, and the rest of his imitators, whose ballads are generally worse than any thing else they wrote, because, from the very simplicity and truth required by the proper nature of such compositions, they less tolerate an appearance of affectation.

Cervantes, who was Góngora’s contemporary, tells us that he composed vast numbers which are now lost; and, from his own opinion of them, we have no reason to regret their fate. Lope’s, on the contrary, which he preserved with a care for his own reputation that was not at all characteristic of Cervantes, are still numerous and often excellent; especially those that relate to himself and his loves, some of the best of which seem to have been produced at Valencia and Lisbon.[52] At the same time and later, good ballads were written by Quevedo, who descended even to the style of the rogues in their composition; by Bernarda de Fereira, a nun in the romantic convent of Buzaco, in Portugal; by Rebolledo, the diplomatist; and perhaps, though with some hesitation, we should add, by Solís, the historian.[53] Indeed, wherever we turn, in the Spanish poetry of this period, we find ballads in all their varieties of tone and character,—often by authors otherwise little known, like Alarcon, who, in the end of the sixteenth century, wrote excellent devout ballads,[54] or Diego de la Chica, who is remembered only for a single satirical one, preserved by Espinosa in the beginning of the seventeenth;[55]—but we always find them in the works of those poets of note who desired to stand well with the mass of their countrymen.