A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

It was a sight to see the lances rise and fall that day;

The shivered shields and riven mail, to see how thick they lay;

The pennons that went in snow-white come out a gory red;

The horses running riderless, the riders lying dead;

While Moors call on Muhammad, and 'St. James!' the Christians cry."

Indubitably this (and it were easy to match it elsewhere in the Poema) is the work of an original genius who redeems his superficial borrowings of incident from Roland by a treatment all his own. That he knew the French models is evident from his skilful conveyance of the bear episode in Ider to his own pages, where the Cid encounters the beast as a lion. But the language shows no hint of French influence, and both thought and expression are profoundly national. The poet's name is irrecoverable, but the internal evidence points strongly to the conclusion that he came from the neighbourhood of Medina Celi. The surmise that he was an Asturian rests solely upon the absence of the diphthong ue from his lines, an inference on the face of it unwarrantable. Against this is the topographical minuteness with which the poet reports the sallies of the Cid in the districts of Castejón and Alcocer; his marked ignorance of the country round Zaragoza and Valencia, his detailed description of the central episode—the outrage upon the Cid's daughters in the wood of Corpes, near Berlanga; and the important fact that the four chief itineraries in the Poema are charged with minutiæ from Molina to San Esteban de Gormaz, while they grow vague and more confused as they extend towards Burgos and Valencia. The most probable conjecture, then, is that the unknown maker of this primitive masterpiece came from the Valle de Arbujuelo; and it is worth adding that this opinion is supported by the authority of Sr. Menéndez Pidal. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the early poet's worth is to be found in this: that his conception of his hero has outlived the true historic Cid, and has forced the child of his imagination upon the acceptance of mankind.

Even more fantastic is the personality of Ruy Diaz as rendered by the anonymous compiler of the Crónica Rimada (Rhymed Chronicle of Events in Spain from the Death of King Pelayo to Ferdinand the Great, and more especially of the Adventures of the Cid). The composition which bears this clumsy and inappropriate title is better named the Cantar de Rodrigo, and consists of 1125 lines, preceded by a scrap of rugged prose. Not till after digressions into other episodes, and irrelevant stories of Miro and Bernardo, Bishops of Palencia, probably fellow-townsmen of the compiler, does the Cid appear. He is no longer, as in the Poema, a popular hero, idealised from historic report; he is a purely imaginary figure, incrusted with a mass of fables accumulated in course of time. At the age of twelve he slays Gómez Górmaz (an almost impossible style, compounded of a patronymic and the name of a castle belonging to the Cid), is claimed by the dead man's daughter, weds her, vanquishes the Moors, and leads his King's—Fernando's—troops to the gates of Paris, defeating the Count of Savoy upon the road. One legend is heaped upon another, and the poem, the end of which is lost, breaks off with the Pope's request for a year's truce, which Fernando, acting as ever upon the Cid's advice, magnanimously extends for twelve years. It is hard to say whether the Cantar de Rodrigo as we have it is the production of a single composer, or whether it is a patchwork by different hands, arranged from earlier poems, and eked out by prose stories and by oral traditions. The versification is that of the simple sixteen-syllabled line, each hemistich of which forms a typical romance line. This in itself is a sign of its later date, and to this must be added the traces of deliberate imitation of the Poema, and the writer's familiarity with such modern devices as heraldic emblems. Further, the use of a Provençal form like gensor, the unmistakable tokens of French influence, the anticipation of the metre of the clerkly poems, the writer's frank admission of earlier songs on the same subject, the metamorphosis of the Cid into a feudal baron, and, above all, the decadent spirit of the entire work: these are tokens which imply a relative modernity. Much of the obscurity of language, which has been mistaken for archaism, is simply due to the defects of the manuscript; and the evidence goes to show that the Rodrigo, put together in the last decade of the twelfth century or the first of the thirteenth, was retouched in the fourteenth by Spanish juglares humiliated by the recent French invasions. Even so, much of the primitive pastiche remains, and the Rodrigo, which is mentioned in the General Chronicle, interests us as being the fountain-head of those romances on the Cid whose collection we owe to that enthusiastic and most learned investigator, Madame Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. Far inferior in merit and interest to the Poema, the Rodrigo ranks with it as representative of the submerged mass of cantares de gesta, and is rightly valued as the venerable relic of a lost school.

To these succeed three anonymous poems, the Libro de Apolonio (Book of Apollonius), the Vida de Santa María Egipciaqua (Life of St. Mary the Egyptian), and the Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient (Book of the Three Eastern Kings), all discovered in one manuscript in the Escurial Library by Pedro José Pidal, and first published by him in 1844. The story of Apollonius, supposed to be a translation of a Greek romance, filters into European literature by way of the Gesta Romanorum, is found even in Icelandic and Danish versions, and is familiar to English readers of Pericles. The nameless Spanish arranger of the thirteenth century (probably a native of Aragón) gives the story of Apollonius' adventures with force and clearness, anticipating in the character of Tarsiana the type of Preciosa, the heroine of Cervantes' Gitanilla and of Weber's opera. Unfortunately the closing tags of moralisings on the vanity of life destroy the effect which the writer has produced by his free translation. His text is suffused with Provençalisms, and his mono-rhymed quatrains of fourteen syllables are evidence of French or Provençal origin. This metrical novelty, extending over more than six hundred stanzas, is properly regarded by the author as his chief distinction, and he implores God and the Virgin to guide him in the exercise of the new mastery (nueva maestría). It is fair to add that his experiment has the interest of novelty, that it succeeded beyond measure in its time, and that its monotonous vogue endured for some two hundred years.

To the same period belongs the Vida de Santa María Egipciaqua, the earliest Castilian example of verses of nine syllables. In substance it is a version of the Vie de Saint Marie l'Egyptienne, ascribed without much reason to the veritable Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (? 1175-1253), among whose Carmina Anglo-Normannica the French original is interpolated. The Spanish version follows the French lead with almost pedantic exactitude; but the metre, new and well suited to the common ear, is handled with an easy grace remarkable in a first effort. As happens with other works of this time, the title of the short Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient is misleading. The visit of the Magi is briefly dismissed in the first fifty lines, the poem turning chiefly upon the Flight into Egypt, the miracle wrought upon the leprous child of the robber, and the identification of the latter with the repentant thief of the New Testament. Like its predecessor, this legend is given in nine-syllabled verse, and is undoubtedly borrowed from a French or Provençal source not yet discovered.