In the Disputa del Alma y el Cuerpo (Argument betwixt Body and Soul), a subject which passes into all mediæval literatures from a copy of Latin verses styled Rixa Animi et Corporis, there is a recurrence, though with innumerable variants of measure, to the Alexandrine type. Thus it is sought to reproduce the music of the model, an Anglo-Norman poem, written in rhymed couplets of six syllables, and wrongly attributed to Walter Map. With it should go the Debate entre el Agua y el Vino (Debate between Water and Wine), and the first Castilian lyric, Razón feita d'Amor (the Lay of Love). Composed in verses of nine syllables, the poem deals with the meeting of two lovers, their colloquy, interchanges, and separation. Both pieces, discovered within the last seventeen years by M. Morel-Fatio, are the productions of a single mind. It is tempting to identify the writer with the Lope de Moros mentioned in the final line, "Lupus me feçit de Moros"; still the likelihood is that, here as elsewhere, the copyist has but signed his transcription. Whoever the author may have been—and the internal evidence tends to show that he was a clerk familiar with French, Provençal, Italian, or Portuguese exemplars—he shines by virtue of qualities which are akin to genius. His delicacy and variety of sentiment, his finish of workmanship, his deliberate lyrical effects, announce the arrival of the equipped artist, the craftsman no longer content with rhymed narration, the singer with a personal, distinctive note. Here was a poet who recognised that in literature—the least moral of the arts—the end justifies the means; hence he transformed the material which he borrowed, made it his own possession, and conveyed into Castile a new method adapted to her needs. But time and language were not yet ripe, and the Spanish lyric flourished solely in Galicia: it was not to be transplanted at a first attempt. Yet the attempt was worth the trial; for it closes the anonymous period with a triumph to which, if we except the Poema del Cid, it can show no fellow.
Footnote:
[2] Joannes Karl Thilo, Codex Apocryphus Novi Testamenti. Lipsiæ, 1833. Pp. 254-261, 388-393.
CHAPTER III
THE AGE OF ALFONSO THE LEARNED, AND OF SANCHO
1220-1300
If we reject the claim of Lope de Moros to be the author of the Razón feita d'Amor, the first Castilian poet whose name reaches us is Gonzalo de Berceo (?1198-?1264), a secular priest attached to the Benedictine monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, in the diocese of Calahorra. A few details are known of him. He was certainly a deacon in 1220, and his name occurs in documents between 1237 and 1264. He speaks of his advanced age in the Vida de Santa Oria, Virgen, his latest and perhaps most finished work; and his birthplace, Berceo, is named in his Historia del Señor San Millán de Cogolla, as in his rhymed biography of St. Dominic of Silas. His copiousness runs to some thirteen thousand lines, including, besides the works already named, the Sacrificio de la Misa (Sacrifice of the Mass), the Martirio de San Lorenzo (Martyrdom of St. Lawrence), the Loores de Nuestra Señora (Praises of Our Lady), the Signos que aparecerán ante del Juicio (Signs visible before the Judgment), the Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Miracles of Our Lady), the Duelo que hizo la Virgen María el día de la Pasión de su hijo Jesucristo (The Virgin's Lament on the day of her Son's Passion), and three hymns to the Holy Ghost, the Virgin, and God the Father. In most editions of Berceo there is appended to his verses a poem in his praise, attributed to an unknown writer of the fourteenth century. This poem is, in fact, conjectured to be an invention of Tomás Antonio Sánchez, the earliest editor of Berceo's complete works (1779). The chances are that Berceo and his writings had passed out of remembrance within two hundred years of his death, and he was evidently unknown to Santillana in the fifteenth century. But a brief extract from him is given in the Moisén Segundo (Second Moses) of Ambrosio Gómez, published in 1653. With the exception of the Martirio de San Lorenzo, of which the end is lost, all Berceo's writings have been preserved, and he suffers by reason of his exuberance.
He sings in the vernacular, he declares, being too unlearned in the Latin; but he has his little pretensions. Though he calls himself a juglar, he marks the differences between his dictados (poems) and the cantares (songs) of a plain juglar, and he vindicates his title by that monotonous metre—the cuaderna vía—which was taken up in the Libro de Apolonio and became the model of all learned clerks in the next generations. Berceo uses the rhythm with success, and if his results are not splendid, it was not because he lacked perseverance. On the contrary, his industry was only too formidable. And, as a little of the mono-rhymed quatrain goes far, he must have perished had he depended upon execution. Beside Dante's achievement, as Puymaigre notes, the paraphrases of Berceo in the Sacrificio de la Misa (stanzas 250-266) seem thin and pale; but the comparison is unfair to the earlier Castilian singer, who died in his obscure hamlet without the advantage of Dante's splendid literary tradition. Berceo is hampered by his lack of imagination, by the poverty of his conditions, by the absence of models, by the narrow circle of his subjects, and by the pious scruples which hindered him from arabesquing the original design. Yet he possesses the gifts of simplicity and of unction, and amid his long digressions into prosy theological commonplace there are flashes of mystic inspiration unmatched by any other poet of his country and his time. Even when his versification, clear but hard, is at its worst, he accomplishes the end which he desires by popularising the pious legends which were dear to him. He was not—never could have been—a great poet. But in his own way he was, if not an inventor, the chief of a school, and the necessary predecessor of such devout authors as Luis de León and St. Teresa. He was a pioneer in the field of devout pastoral, with all the defects of the inexperienced explorer; and, for the most part, he had nothing to guide him but his own uncultured instinct. Some specimen of his work may be given in Hookham Frere's little-known fragmentary version of the Vida de San Millán:—
"He walked those mountains wild, and lived within that nook