A History of Spanish Literature

by James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

Of more singular interest is the incomplete Poema de José or Historia de Yusuf, named by the writer, Al-hadits de Jusuf. This curious monument, due doubtless to some unconverted Mudéjar of Toledo, is the typical example of the literature called aljamiada. The language is correct Castilian of the time, and the metre, sustained for 312 stanzas, is the right Bercean: the peculiarity lies in the use of Arabic characters in the phonetic transcription. A considerable mass of such compositions has been discovered (and in the discovery England has taken part); but of them all the Historia de Yusuf is at once the best and earliest. It deals with the story of Joseph in Egypt, not according to the Old Testament narrative, but in general conformity with the version found in the eleventh sura of the Ku'rān, though the writer does not hesitate to introduce variants and amplifications of his own invention, as (stanza 31) when the wolf speaks to the patriarch whose son it is supposed to have slain. The persecution of Joseph by Potiphar's wife, who figures as Zulija (Zuleikah), is told with considerable spirit, and the mastery of the cuaderna vía (the Bercean metre of four fourteen-syllabled lines rhymed together) is little short of amazing in a foreigner. At whiles an Arabic word creeps into the text, and the invocation of Allah, with which the poem opens, is repeated in later stanzas; but, taken as a whole, apart from the oriental colouring inseparable from the theme, there is a marked similarity of tone between the Historia de Yusuf and its predecessors the "clerkly poems." An oriental subject handled by an Arab gave the best possible opportunity for introducing orientalism in the treatment; the occasion is eschewed, and the lettered Arab studiously follows in the wake of Berceo and the other Castilian models known to him. There could scarcely be more striking evidence of the irresistible progress of Castilian modes of thought and expression. The Arabic influence, if it ever existed, was already dead.

Juan Ruiz, Archpriest of Hita, near Guadalajara, is the greatest name in early Castilian literature. The dates of his birth and death are not known. A line in his Libro de Cantares (stanza 1484) inclines us to believe that, like Cervantes, he was a native of Alcalá de Henares; but Guadalajara also claims him for her own, and a certain Francisco de Torres reports him as living there so late as 1415. This date is incompatible with other ascertained facts in Ruiz' career. We learn from a note at the end of his poems that "this is the book of the Archpriest of Hita, which he wrote, being imprisoned by order of the Cardinal Don Gil, Archbishop of Toledo." Now, Gil Albornoz held the see between the years 1337 and 1367; and another clerk, named Pedro Fernández, was Archpriest of Hita in 1351. Most likely Juan Ruiz was born at the close of the thirteenth century, and died, very possibly in gaol, before his successor was appointed. On the showing of his own writings, Juan Ruiz was a cleric of irregular life at a time when disorder was at its worst, and his thirteen years in prison proclaim him a Goliard of the loosest kind. He testifies against himself with a splendid candour; and yet there have been critics who insisted on idealising this libidinous clerk into a smug Boanerges. There was never a more grotesque travesty, a more purblind misunderstanding of facts and the man.

The Archpriest was a fellow of parts and of infinite fancy. He does, indeed, allege that he supplies, "incentives to good conduct, injunctions towards salvation, to be understanded of the people and to enable folk to guard against the trickeries which some practise in pursuit of foolish loves." He comes pat with a text from Scripture quoted for his own purpose:—"Intellectum tibi dabo, et instruam te in via hac, qua gradieris." He passes from David to Solomon, and, with his tongue in his cheek, transcribes his versicle:—"Initium sapientiæ timor Domini." St. John, Job, Cato, St. Gregory, the Decretals—he calls them all into court to witness his respectable intention, and at a few lines' distance he unmasks in a passage which prudish editors have suppressed:—"Yet, since it is human to sin, if any choose the ways of love (which I do not recommend), the modes thereof are recounted here;" and so forth, in detail the reverse of edifying. Ovid's erotic verses are freely rendered, the Archpriest's unsuccessful battle against love is told, and the liturgy is burlesqued in the procession of "clerks and laymen and monks and nuns and duennas and gleemen to welcome love into Toledo." The attempt to exhibit Ruiz as an edifying citizen is, on the face of it, absurd.

Much that he wrote is lost, but the seventeen hundred stanzas that remain suffice for any reputation. Juan Ruiz strikes the personal note in Castilian literature. To distinguish the works of the clerkly masters, to declare with certainty that this Castilian piece was written by Alfonso and that by Sancho, is a difficult and hazardous matter. Not so with Ruiz. The stamp of his personality is unmistakable in every line. He was bred in the old tradition, and he long abides by the rules of the mester de clerecía; but he handles it with a freedom unknown before, imparts to it a new flexibility, a variety, a speed, a music beyond all precedent, and transfuses it with a humour which anticipates Cervantes. Nay, he does more. In his prose preface he asserts that he chiefly sought to give examples of prosody, of rhyme and composition:—"Dar algunas lecciones, é muestra de versificar, et rimar et trobar." And he followed the bent of his natural genius. He had an infinitely wider culture than any of his predecessors in verse. All that they knew he knew—and more; and he treated them in the true cavalier spirit of the man who feels himself a master. His famous description of the tent of love is manifestly suggested by the description of Alexander's tent in the Libro de Alexandre. The entire episode of Doña Endrina is paraphrased from the Liber de Amore, attributed to the Pseudo-Ovid, the Auvergnat monk who hides beneath the name of Pamphilus Maurilianus.

French fableaux were rifled by Ruiz without a scruple, though he had access to their great originals in the Disciplina clericalis of Petrus Alphonsus; for to his mind the improved treatment was of greater worth than the mere bald story. He was familiar with the Kalilah and Dimnah, with Fadrique's Crafts and Wiles of Women, perhaps with the apologues of Lull and Juan Manuel. Vast as his reading was, it had availed him nothing without his superb temperament, his gift of using it to effect. Vaster still was his knowledge of men, his acquaintance with the seamy side of life, his interest in things common and rare, his observation of manners, and his lyrical endowment. The name of "the Spanish Petronius" has been given to him; yet, despite a superficial resemblance between the two, it is a misnomer. Far nearer the truth, though the Spaniard lacks the dignity of the Englishman, is Ticknor's parallel with Chaucer. Like Chaucer, Ruiz had an almost incomparable gust for life, an immitigable gaiety of spirit, which penetrates his transcription of the Human Comedy. Like Chaucer, his adventurous curiosity led him to burst the bonds of the prison-house and to confer upon his country new rhythms and metres. His four cánticas de serrana, suggested by the Galician makers, anticipate by a hundred years the serranillas and the vaqueiras of Santillana, and entitle him to rank as the first great lyric poet of Castile. Ruiz, likewise, had a Legend of Women; but his reading was his own, and Chaucer's adjective cannot be applied to it. His ambition is, not to idealise, but to realise existence, and he interprets its sensuous animalism in the spirit of picaresque enjoyment. Jewesses, Moorish dancers, the procuress Trota-conventos, her finicking customers, the loose nuns, great ladies, and brawny daughters of the plough,—Ruiz renders them with the merciless exactitude of Velázquez.

The arrangement of Ruiz' verse, disorderly as his life, foreshadows the loose construction of the picaresque novel, of which his own work may be considered the first example. One of his greatest discoveries is the rare value of the autobiographic form. Mingled with parodies of hymns, with burlesques of old cantares de gesta, with glorified paraphrases of both Ovids (the true and the false), with versions of oriental fables read in books or gathered from the lips of vagrant Arabs, with peculiar wealth of popular refrains and proverbs—with these goes the tale of the writer's individual life, rich in self-mockery, gross in thought, abundant in incident, splendid in expression, slyly edifying in the moral conclusion which announces an immediate relapse. Poet, novelist, expert in observation, irony, and travesty, Ruiz had, moreover, the sense of style in such measure as none before him and few after him, and to this innate faculty of selection he joined a great capacity for dramatic creation. Hence the impossibility of exhibiting him in elegant extracts, and hence the permanence of his types. The most familiar figure of Lazarillo de Tormes—the starving gentleman—is a lineal descendant of Ruiz' Don Furón, who is scrupulous in observing facts so long as there is nothing to eat; and Ruiz' two lovers, Melón de la Uerta and Endrina de Calatayud, are transferred as Calisto and Melibea to Rojas' tragi-comedy, whence they pass into immortality as Romeo and Juliet. Lastly, Ruiz' repute might be staked upon his fables, which, by their ironic appreciation, their playful wit and humour, seem to proceed from an earlier, ruder, more virile La Fontaine.

Contemporary with Juan Ruiz was the Infante Juan Manuel (1282-1347), grandson of St. Ferdinand and nephew of Alfonso the Learned. In his twelfth year he served against the Moors on the Murcian frontier, became Mayordomo to Fernando IV., and succeeded to the regency shortly after that King's death in 1312. Mariana's denunciation of "him who seemed born solely to wreck the state" fits Juan Manuel so exactly that it is commonly applied to him; but, in truth, its author intended it for another Don Juan (without the "Manuel"), uncle of the boy-king, Alfonso XI. Upon the regency followed a spell of wars, broils, rebellions, assassinations, wherein King and ex-Regent were pitted against each other. Neither King nor soldier bore malice, and the latter shared in the decisive victory of Salado and—perhaps with Chaucer's Gentle Knight—in the siege of Algezir (Algeciras). Fifty years of battle would fill most men's lives; but the love of literature ran in the blood of Juan Manuel's veins, and, like others of his kindred, he proved the truth of the old Castilian adage:—"Lance never blunted pen, nor pen lance."

He set a proper value on himself and his achievement. In the General Introduction to his works he foresees, so he announces, that his books must be often copied, and he knows that this means error:—"as I have seen happen in other copies, either because of the transcriber's dulness, or because the letters are much alike." Wherefore Juan Manuel prepared, so to say, a copyright edition, with a prefatory bibliography, whose deficiencies may be supplemented by a second list given at the beginning of his Conde Lucanor. And he closes his General Introduction with this prayer:—"And I beg all those who may read any of the books I made not to blame me for whatever ill-written thing they find, until they see it in this volume which I myself have arranged." His care seemed excessive: it proved really insufficient, since the complete edition which he left to the monastery at Peñafiel has disappeared. Some of his works are lost to us, as the Book of Chivalry,[4] a treatise dealing with the Engines of War, a Book of Verses, the Art of Poetic Composition (Reglas como se debe Trovar), and the Book of Sages. The loss of the Book of Verses is a real calamity; all the more that it existed at Peñafiel as recently as the time of Argote de Molina (1549-90), who meant to publish it. Juan Manuel's couplets and quatrains of four, eight, eleven, twelve, and fourteen syllables, his arrangement (Enxemplo XVI.) of the octosyllabic redondilla in the Conde Lucanor, prove him an adept in the Galician form, an irreproachable virtuoso in his art. It seems almost certain that his Book of Verses included many remarkable exercises in political satire; and, in any case, his example and position must have greatly influenced the development of the courtly school of poets at Juan II.'s court.

A treatise like his Libro de Caza (Book of Hawking), recently recovered by Professor Baist, needs but to be mentioned to indicate its aim. His histories are mere epitomes of Alfonso's chronicle. The Libro del Caballero et del Escudero (Book of the Knight and Squire), in fifty-one chapters, of which some thirteen are missing, is a didacticism, a fabliella, modelled upon Ramón Lull's Libre del Orde de Cavallería. A hermit who has abandoned war instructs an ambitious squire in the virtues of chivalry, and sends him to court, whence he returns "with much wealth and honour." The inquiry begins anew, and the hermit expounds to his companion the nature of angels, paradise, hell, the heavens, the elements, the art of posing questions, the stuff of the planets, sea, earth, and all that is therein—birds, fish, plants, trees, stones, and metals. In some sort the Tratado sobre las Armas (Treatise on Arms) is a memoir of the writer's house, containing a powerful presentation of the death of Juan Manuel's guardian, King Sancho, passing to eternity beneath his father's curse.

Juan Manuel follows Sancho's example by preparing twenty-six chapters of Castigos (Exhortations), sometimes called the Libro infinido, or Unfinished Book, addressed to his son, a boy of nine. He reproduces Sancho's excellent manner and sound practical advice without the flaunting erudition of his cousin. The Castigos are suspended to supply the monk, Juan Alfonso, with a treatise on the Modes of Love, fifteen in number; being, in fact, an ingenious discussion on friendship. Juan Manuel is seen almost at his best in his Libro de los Estados (Book of States), otherwise the Book of the Infante, and thought by some to be the missing Book of Sages. The allegorical didactic vein is worked to exhaustion in one hundred and fifty chapters, which relate the education of the pagan Morován's son, Johas, by a certain Turín, who, unable to satisfy his pupil, calls to his aid the celebrated preacher Julio. After interminable discussions and resolutions of theological difficulties, the story ends in the baptism of father, son, and tutor. Gayangos gives us the key; Johas is Juan Manuel; Morován is his father, Manuel; Turín is Pero López de Ayala, grandfather of the future Chancellor; and Julio represents St. Dominic (who, as a matter of fact, died before Juan Manuel's father was born). This confused philosophic story, suggestive of the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, is in truth the vehicle for conveying the author's ideas on every sort of question, and it might be described without injustice as the carefully revised commonplace book of an omnivorous reader with a care for form. A postscript to the Book of States is the Book of Preaching Friars, a summary of the Dominican constitution expounded by Julio to his pupil. A very similar dissertation is the Treatise showing that the Blessed Mary is, body and soul, in Paradise, directed to Remón Masquefa, Prior of Peñafiel.