sienpre en este mundo fuste per dos maridada;
¿quien te me rrebato, vieja par mj sienpre lasrada?
The Archpriest adds an impudent epitaph on Trotaconventos, who is represented as saying that, though her mode of life was censurable, she made many a happy marriage; as begging all who visit her grave to say a Pater Noster for her; and as wishing them in return the conjoint joys of both heavenly and earthly love. After this sally of blasphemous irony comes advice as to the arms which Christians should use against the devil, the world, and the flesh—a tedious exhortation from which the author breaks away to declare that he has always wished everything (including sermons) to be short, and with this he digresses into a panegyric on little women. But another March has come round, and, as usual, in the spring the Archpriest’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. In default of the gifted Trotaconventos, he employs Don Furón, a liar, drunkard, thief, mischief-maker, gambler, bully, glutton, wrangler, blasphemer, fortune-teller, debauchee, trickster, fool and idler: apart from the defects inherent to these fourteen characters, Don Furón is as good a fa tutto as one can hope to have. But he fails in the only embassy on which he is sent, and, with a good-humoured laugh at his own folly, the Archpriest narrates his last misadventure as a lover. With an elaborate exposition of the saintly sentiments which actuated the author (for whom every reader is entreated to say a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria), the Libro de buen amor ends. What seems to be a supplement contains seven poems addressed to the Virgin (a begging-song for poor students being interpolated between the second and third poem). The Salamanca manuscript closes with an amusingly impertinent composition in which a certain archpriest unnamed—possibly Juan Ruiz himself—is described as being sent by Don Gil Albornoz, the Archbishop of Toledo, with a brief from the Pope inculcating celibacy on the Dean and Chapter of Talavera. What follows has all the air of being a personal experience. The brief is no sooner read in church than the Dean is on his legs, threatening to resign rather than submit; the Treasurer wishes that he could lay hands on the meddling Archbishop, and both the Precentor Sancho and the Canon Don Gonzalo join in an indignant protest against the attempt to curtail clerical privileges. The Gayoso manuscript, which omits this Cántica de los clérigos de Talavera, includes two songs for blind men, and these are printed by M. Ducamin as a sort of last postscript to the Libro de buen amor.
Having analysed the contents of the work, we are now in a better position to form a judgment on the conclusion implied by an incidental question in M. Alfred Jeanroy’s admirable book, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France au moyen âge:—‘Mais qui ne sait que l’œuvre de Hita est une macédoine d’imitations françaises, qui témoignent du reste de la plus grande originalité d’esprit?’ The proposition may be too broadly put, but it is fundamentally true. The Archpriest borrows in all directions. The sources of between twenty and thirty of his fables have been pointed out by Wolf, and may be followed up a little higher in the works of M. Hervieux and Mr. Jacobs. Orientalists no doubt could tell us, if they chose, the origin of the story of King Alcarás and his doomed son:—
Era vn Rey de moros, Alcarás nonbre avia;
nasçiole vn fijo bello, mas de aquel non tenja,
enbjo por sus sabios, dellos saber querria
el signo e la planeta del fijo quel nasçia.
Once at least the Archpriest hits on a subject which also attracted his contemporary the Infante Don Juan Manuel: the Libro de buen amor and the Conde Lucanor both relate the story of the thief who sold his soul to the devil. But the differences between the two men are more marked than the resemblances. The Archpriest has nothing of the Infante’s imposing gravity and cold disdain; his temperament is more exuberant, the note of his humour is more incorrigibly picaresque, and he seeks his subjects further afield. The tale of the pantomimic dispute between the learned Greek and the illiterate Roman is thought by Wolf to derive probably from some mediæval Latin source, and Sr. Puyol y Alonso particularises with the ingenious suggestion that the Archpriest took it from a commentary by Accursius on Pomponius’s text of the Digest (De origine juris, Tit. ii.). Perhaps: but this is just the sort of story that circulated orally in the Middle Ages from one country to another as smoking-room jests float across the Atlantic now, and Ruiz is quite as likely to have picked it up from a tramping tinker, or a tumbler at a booth, as from the famous juridical glossator of the previous century.
We cannot tell who his friends were nor where he went; but the Libro de buen amor shows that he had acquaintances in all classes—especially in the least starched of them—and it would not surprise me to learn that he had wandered as far as Italy or France. Life was brighter, more full of opportunities, for a clerical picaroon in the fourteenth century than it is to-day. Now he would be suspended as a scandal: then the world was all before him where to choose. Of Italian I am not so sure: certainly the Archpriest knew French literature better than we should expect. Observe that the Treasurer of the Talavera Chapter mentions Blanchefleur, Floire and Tristan, and (of course) finds their trials less pathetic than his own and the worthy Teresa’s.