A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

His presence all that place with sanctity did fill."

This is Berceo in a very characteristic vein, dealing with his own special saint in his chosen way—the way of the "new mastery"; and he keeps to the same rhythm in the nine hundred odd stanzas which he styles the Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Here his devotion inspires him to more conscientious effort; and it has been sought to show that Berceo takes his tales as he finds them in the Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, by the French trouvère, Gautier de Coinci, Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne (1177-1236). Certain it is that Gautier's source, the Soissons manuscript, was known to Alfonso the Learned, who mentions it in the sixty-first of his Galician songs as "a book full of miracles":—

"En Seixons ... un liuro a todo cheo de miragres."

There were doubtless earlier Latin collections—amongst others, Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum historiale and Pothon's Liber de miraculis Sanctæ Dei Genitricis Mariæ—which both Berceo and Alfonso used. But since Alfonso, a middle-aged man when Berceo died, knew the Soissons collection, it seems possible that Berceo also handled it. A close examination of his text converts the bare possibility into something approaching certainty. Of Berceo's twenty-five Marian legends, eighteen are given by Gautier de Coinci, whose total reaches fifty-five. This is not by itself final, for both writers might have selected them from a common source. Yet there are convincing proofs of imitation in the coincidences of thought and expression which are apparent in Gautier and Berceo. These are too numerous to be accidental; and still more weight must be given to the fact that in several cases where Gautier invents a detail of his own wit, Berceo reproduces it. Taken in conjunction with his known habit of strict adherence to his text, it follows that Berceo took Gautier for his guide. He did what all the world was doing in borrowing from the French, and in the Virgin's Lament he has the candour to confess the northern supremacy.

Still, it would be wrong to think that Berceo contents himself with mere servile reproduction, or that he trespasses in the manner of a vulgar plagiary. Seven of his legends he seeks elsewhere than in Gautier, and he takes it upon himself to condense his predecessor's diffuse narration. Thus, where Gautier needs 1350 lines to tell the legend of St. Ildefonsus, or 2090 to give the miracle of Theophilus, Berceo confines himself to 108 and to 657 lines. Gautier will spare you no detail; he will have you know the why, the when, the how, the paltriest circumstance of his pious story. Beside him Berceo shines by his power of selection, by his finer instinct for the essential, by his relative sobriety of tone, by his realistic eye, by his variety of resource in pure Castilian expression, by his richer melody, and by the fleeter movement of his action. In a word, with all his imperfections, Berceo approves himself the sounder craftsman of the two, and therefore he finds thirty readers where the Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne finds one. Small and few as his opportunities were, he rarely failed to use them to an advantage; as in the invention of the singular rhymed octosyllabic song—with its haunting refrain, Eya velar!—in the Virgin's Lament (stanzas 170-198). This argues a considerable lyrical gift, and the pity is that the most of Berceo's editors should have been at such pains to hide it from the reader.

In the ten thousand lines of the Libro de Alexandre are recounted the imaginary adventures of the Macedonian king, as told in Gautier de Lille's Alexandreis and in the versions of Lambert de Tort and Alexandre de Bernai. Traces of the Leonese dialect negative the ascription to Berceo, and the Juan Lorenzo Segura de Astorga mentioned in the last verses is a mere copyist. The Poema de Fernán González, due to a monk of San Pedro de Arlanza, embodies many picturesque and primitive legends in Berceo's manner. But the value of both these compositions is slight.

So much for verse. Castilian prose develops on parallel lines with it. A very early specimen is the didactic treatise called the Diez Mandamientos, written by a Navarrese monk, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, for the use of confessors. Somewhat later follow the Anales Toledanos, in two separate parts (the third is much more recent), composed between the years 1220 and 1250. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo (1170-1247), wrote a Latin Historia Gothica, which begins with the Gothic invasion, and ends at the year 1243. Undertaken at the bidding of St. Ferdinand of Castile, this work was summarised, and done into Castilian, probably by Jiménez de Rada himself, under the title of the Historia de los Godos. Its date would be the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, and to this same time (1241) belongs the Fuero Juzgo (Forum Judicum). This is a Castilian version of a code of so-called Gothic laws, substantially Roman in origin, given by St. Ferdinand (1200-1252) to the Spaniards settled in Córdoba and other southern cities after the reconquest; but though of extreme value to the philologer, its literary interest is too slight to detain us here. Two most brilliant specimens of early Spanish prose are the letters supposed to have been written by the dying Alexander to his mother; and the accident of their being found in the manuscript copied by Lorenzo Segura de Astorga has led to their being printed at the end of the Libro de Alexandre. There is good reason for thinking that they are not by the author of that poem; and, in truth, they are mere translations. Both letters are taken from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī's Arabic collection of moral sentences; the first is found in the Bonium (so called from its author, a mythical King of Persia), and the second on the Castilian version of the Secretum Secretorum, of which the very title is reproduced as Poridat de las Poridades. Further examples of progressive prose are found in the Libro de los doce Sabios, which deals with the political education of princes, and may have been drawn up by the direction of St. Ferdinand. But the authorship and date of these compilations are little better than conjectural.

These are the preliminary essays in the stuff of Spanish prose. Its permanent form was received at the hands of Alfonso the Learned (1226-84), who followed his father, St. Ferdinand, to the Castilian throne in 1252. Unlucky in his life, balked of his ambition to wear the title of Emperor, at war with Popes, his own brothers, his children, and his people, Alfonso has been hardly entreated after death. Mariana, the greatest of Spanish historians, condenses the vulgar verdict in a Tacitean phrase: Dum cœlum considerat terra amissit. A mountain of libellous myth has overlaid Alfonso's fame. Of all the anecdotes concerning him, the best known is that which reports him as saying, "Had God consulted me at the creation of the world, He would have made it differently." This deliberate invention is due to Pedro IV. (the Ceremonious); and if Pedro foresaw the result, he must have been a scoundrel of genius. Fortunately, nothing can rob Alfonso of his right to be considered, not only as the father of Castilian verse, but as the centre of all Spanish intellectual life. Political disaster never caused his intellectual activity to slacken. Like Bacon, he took all knowledge for his province, and in every department he shone pre-eminent. Astronomy, music, philosophy, canon and civil law, history, poetry, the study of languages: he forced his people upon these untrodden roads. To catalogue the series of his scientific enterprises, and to set down the names of his Jewish and Arab collaborators, would give ample work to a bibliographer. Both the Tablas Alfonsis and the colossal Libros del Saber de Astronomía (Books on the Science of Astronomy) are packed with minute corrections of Ptolemy, in whose system the learned King seems to have suspected an error; but their present interest lies in the historic fact, that with their compilation Castilian makes its first great stride in the direction of exactitude and clearness.