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

by George Ticknor

On all accounts, therefore, the connection between Rome and Spain was intimate, and the civilization and refinement of the province took their character early from those of the capital. Sertorius found it a wise policy to cause the children of the principal native families to be taught Latin and Greek, and to become accomplished in the literature and elegant knowledge to be found in those admirable languages;[407] and when, ten years later, Metellus, in his turn, had crushed the power of Sertorius, and came home triumphant to Rome, he brought with him a number of native Cordovan poets, against whose Latinity the fastidious ear of Cicero was able to object only that their accent had pingue quiddam ... atque peregrinum,—something thick, or rude, and foreign.[408]

From this period Latin writers began to be constantly produced in Spain.[409] Portius Latro, a native of Córdova, but a public advocate of the highest reputation at Rome, opened in the metropolis the earliest of those schools for Roman rhetoric, that afterwards became so numerous and so famous, and, among other distinguished men, numbered as his disciples Octavius Cæsar, Mæcenas, Marcus Agrippa, and Ovid. The two Senecas were Spaniards, and so was Lucan; names celebrated enough, certainly, to have conferred lasting glory on any city within the limits of the Empire. Martial came from Bilbilis, and, in his old age, retired there again to die in peace, amidst the scenes which, during his whole life, seem to have been dear to him. Columella, too, the best of the Roman writers on agriculture, was a Spaniard; and so, it is probable, were Quinctilian and Silius Italicus. Many others might be added, whose rights and reputation were fully acknowledged in the capital of the world, during the last days of the Republic, or the best days of the Empire, as orators, poets, and historians; but their works, though famous in their own time, have perished in the general wreck of the larger part of ancient literature. The great lights, however, of Roman letters in Spain are familiar to all, and are at once recognized as constituting an important portion of the body of the Latin classics, and an essential part of the glory of Roman civilization.[410]

After this period, no considerable change, that needs to be noticed, took place in the Spanish Peninsula, until the final overthrow of the Roman power.[411] Undoubtedly, at the Northwest, and especially among the mountains and valleys of what is now called Biscay, the language and institutions of Rome were never established;[412] but, in all the remainder of the country, whatever there was of public policy or intellectual refinement rested on the basis of the Roman character and of Roman civilization. But the Roman character and civilization decayed there, as they did everywhere, and though, during the last four centuries in which the Imperial authority was acknowledged in Spain, the country enjoyed more of tranquillity than was enjoyed in any other province within the limits of the Empire, still, like the others, it was much disturbed during the whole of this fatal period, and was gradually yielding to the common destiny.

It was during this troubled interval, that another great cause of change was introduced into Spain, and began to produce its wide effects on whatever of intellectual culture existed in the country. This great cause was Christianity. The precise point of time, or the precise mode, of its first appearance in Spain cannot now be determined. But it was certainly taught there in the second century, and seems to have come in, through the southern coast, from Africa.[413] At first, as elsewhere, it was persecuted, and therefore professed in secret; but, as early as the year 300, churches had been publicly established, and from the time of Constantine and Osius of Córdova, it was the acknowledged and prevalent religion of large parts of the country. What is of consequence to us is, that the language of Christianity in Spain was the Latin. Its instructions were obviously given in Latin, and its early literature, so far as it appeared in Spain, is found wholly in that language.[414] This is very important, not only because it proves the great diffusion of the Latin language there from the third century to the eighth, but because it shows that no other language was left strong enough to contend with it, at least through the middle and southern portions of the country.

The Christian clergy, however, it must be recollected, did little or nothing to preserve the purity of the Latin language in Spain, or to maintain whatever of an intellectual tone they found in the institutions established by the Romans.[415] How early these institutions, and especially the ancient schools, decayed there, we do not know; but it was earlier than in some other parts of the Empire. In the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries even the ecclesiastics were sunk into the grossest ignorance, so that, when Gregory the Great, who was Pope from 590 to 604, warned Licinian, Bishop of Carthagena, not to give consecration to persons without education, Licinian replied, that, unless it were permitted to consecrate those who knew only that Christ had been crucified, none could be found to fill the priestly office.[416] In fact, Isidore of Seville, the famous Archbishop and saint, who died in 636, is the last of the Spanish ecclesiastics that attempted to write Latin with purity; and even he thought so ill of classical antiquity, that he prohibited the monks under his control from reading books written by heathen of the olden time;[417] thus taking away the only means of preserving from its threatened corruption the language they wrote and spoke.[418] Of course this corruption advanced, in times of confusion and national trouble, at a rapid pace, until the spoken language of the country became, to those out of it, an almost unintelligible jargon; and the offices of the Church, as they were read at mass and on feast days, could no longer be understood by the body of the worshippers. This was the result, partly of the decay of all the Roman institutions, and, indeed, of all the principles on which those institutions had rested, and partly of the invasion and conquest of the country by the Northern barbarians, whose irruption, with the violences that followed it, left for a long time neither the quietness nor the sense of security necessary even to the humblest intellectual culture.[419]

This great irruption of the Northern barbarians effected another and most important revolution in the language of the Peninsula. It in fact gave to it a new character. For the race of men by whom it was made was entirely different, both in its origin, its language, and, indeed, in all that goes to make up national character, from the four races that had previously occupied the country. The new invaders belonged to those vast multitudes beyond the Rhine, who had been much known to the Romans from the time of Julius Cæsar, and who, at the period of which we speak, had been, for above a century, leaning with a portentous weight upon the failing barriers, which, on the banks of that glorious stream, had long marked the limits of Roman power. Urged forward, not only by the natural disposition of Northern nations to come into a milder climate, and of barbarous nations to obtain the spoils of civilization, but by uneasy movements among the Tartars of Upper Asia, which were communicated through the Sclavonic tribes to those of Germany, their accumulated masses burst, in the beginning of the fifth century, with an irresistible impulse, on the wide and ill-defended borders of the Empire. Without noticing the tumultuous attempts that preceded this final and fatal invasion and were either defeated or turned aside, it is enough to say, that the first hordes of the irruption which succeeded in overthrowing the empire of the world began to pass the Rhine at the end of the year 406, and in the beginning of 407. These hordes, however, were pressed forward, it may be said almost without a figure, by the merely physical weight of the large bodies that followed them. Tribe succeeded tribe, with all the facility and haste of a nomadic life, which knows neither local attachments nor local interests, and with all the eagerness and violence of barbarians seeking the grosser luxuries of civilization; so that when, at the end of that century, the last of the greater warlike emigrations had forced for itself a place within the limits of the Roman empire, it may be truly said, that, from the Rhine and the British Channel on the one side, to Calabria and Gibraltar on the other, there was hardly a spot of that empire over which they had not passed, and few where they were not then to be found possessors of the soil, and masters of the political and military power.[420]

In the particular character of the multitudes that finally established themselves within its territory, Spain was certainly less unfortunate than were most of the countries of Europe, that were in a similar manner invaded. The first tribes that rushed over the Pyrenees—the Franks, who came before the general invasion, and the Vandali, the Alani, and the Suevi, who, as far as Spain was concerned, formed its vanguard—committed, no doubt, atrocious excesses, and produced a state of cruel suffering, which is eloquently and indignantly described in a well-known passage of Mariana;[421] but, after a comparatively short period, these tribes or nations passed over into Africa and never returned. The Goths, who succeeded them as invaders, were, it is true, barbarians, like their predecessors, but they were barbarians of a milder and more generous type. They had already been in Italy, where they had become somewhat acquainted with the Roman laws, manners, and language; and when, in 411, they traversed the South of France and entered the Peninsula, they were received rather as friends than as conquerors.[422] Indeed, at first, their authority was exercised in the name and on behalf of the Empire; but, before the century was ended, the last Emperor of the West had ceased to reign; and, by a sort of inevitable necessity, the Visigoth dynasty was established throughout nearly the whole of Spain, and acknowledged by Odoacer, the earliest of the barbarian kings of Italy.

Previously, however, to the entrance of the Visigoths into Spain, they had been converted to Christianity by the venerable Ulfilas; and, as early as 466-484, in a period of great confusion, they had formed for themselves a criminal code of laws, to which, in 506, they added a civil code,—the two being subsequently made to constitute the basis of that important body of laws which, above a century later, was compiled by the fourth Council of Toledo.[423] But, though the Visigoths had thus adopted some of the most important means of civilization, their language, like that of the rest of the Northern invaders, remained essentially barbarous. It was never, at any time, in Spain, a written language. It was of the Teutonic stock, and had nothing, or almost nothing, in common with the Latin. Still, the people who spoke it were so intimately mingled with the conquered people, and each, from its position, had become so dependent on the other, that it was no longer a question whether they should find some medium of communication suited to the daily and hourly intercourse of common life. They were, in fact, compelled to do so. The same consequences, therefore, followed, that followed in the other Roman or Romanized countries which were invaded in the same way. A union of the two languages took place; but not a union on equal terms. This was impossible. For on the side of the Latin were not only the existing, though decayed, institutions of the country, but whatever of civilization and refinement was still to be found in the world, as well as the vast and growing power of the Christian religion, with its organized priesthood, which refused to be heard in any other language. So that, if the Goths, on their part, had the political and military authority, and even a more fresh and vigorous intellectual character, they were obliged, on the whole, to submit to such prevalent influences, and to adopt, in a great degree, the language through which alone they could obtain the benefits of a more advanced state of society. The Latin, therefore, corrupted and degraded as it was, remained in Spain, as it did in the other countries where similar races of men came together, by far the most prominent element in the language that grew out of their union, and was thus made to constitute the grand basis of the modern Spanish.

The most considerable change effected by the invaders in the language they found established in Spain was a change in its grammatical structure. The Goths, like any uncivilized people, could learn the individual words of the more cultivated language they every day heard, easier than they could comprehend the philosophical spirit of its grammar. While, therefore, they freely adopted the large and convenient vocabulary of the Latin, they compelled its complicated forms and constructions to yield to the simpler constructions and habits of their own native dialects. This may be illustrated by the striking changes they wrought in the established inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs. The Romans, it is well known, had strict declensions to mark the relations of their nouns, and strict conjugations by which they distinguished the times of their verbs. The Goths had neither, but used articles united with prepositions to mark the cases of their nouns, and auxiliaries of different kinds to mark the changes in the meanings of their verbs.[424]

When, therefore, in Spain, they received the Latin, where no article existed, they compelled ille, as the nearest word they could find, to serve for their definite article, and unus for their indefinite,—so that, in their oldest deeds and other documents, we find such phrases as ille homo, the man; unus homo, a man; illa mulier, the woman; and so on,—from which the modern Spanish derives its articles el and la, uno, una, etc., just as the French, by a similar process, obtained the articles le and la, un and une, and the Italians il and la, uno and una.[425] The same sort of compromise took place in relation to the verbs. Instead of vici, I have conquered, they said habeo victus; instead of saying amor, I am loved, they said sum amatus; and from such a use of habere and esse, they introduced into the modern Spanish the auxiliaries haber and ser, as the Italians introduced avere and essere, and the French avoir and être.[426] This example of the effect produced by the Goths on the nouns and verbs of the Latin is but a specimen of the changes they brought about in the general structure of that language, by which they contributed their full share towards still further corrupting it, as well as towards modelling it into the present Spanish;—a great revolution, which it required above seven centuries fairly to accomplish, and two or three centuries more entirely to carry out into all its final results.[427]