And you will find from thirty to forty points of resemblance duly noted in Sr. Puyol y Alonso’s valuable study. But what does it matter if a more microscopic scrutiny reveals a hundred parallelisms? Ruiz proceeds as Shakespeare proceeded after him. He picks up waste scraps of base metal from a dunghill, and by his wonder-working touch transforms them into gold. He breathes life into the ghostly abstractions of the pseudonymous Auvergnat, creates a man and a woman in the stress of irresistible passion, and evokes a dramatic atmosphere. You read Pamphilus de Amore: you find it dull when it is not licentious, and you most often find it both dull and licentious at the same time. Not a solitary character, not a single happy line, not one memorable phrase remains with you to redeem its tedious pruriency. The Archpriest’s two lovers are unforgettable: they are not saints—far from it!—but they are human in their weakness, and in their downfall they are the sympathetic victims of disaster. And the vitality of the other personage in this concentrated narrative of illicit love is proved by its persistence in literature. A feminine Tartufe, with a dangerous subtlety and perverse enjoyment of immorality for its own sake, Trotaconventos is the ancestress of Celestina, of Regnier’s Macette, and of the hideous old nurse in Romeo and Juliet. Turn to the end of the Libro de buen amor, and observe the predatory figure of Don Furón: he, too, is unforgettable as the model of the ravenous fine gentleman who condescended to share Lazarillo’s plate of trotters. What matter if the Archpriest lays hands on a fableau, or a conte, or a wearisome piece of lubricity ‘veiled in the obscurity of a learned language’? What matter if he pilfers from the Libro de Alixandre, or steals an idea from the Roman de la Rose? He makes his finds his own by right of conquest, like Catullus or Virgil before him, like Shakespeare and Molière after him.
The sedentary historian, like a housemaid, dearly loves a red coat, and tells us far more than we care to know of arms and the men, drums and trumpets, and the frippery of war. Juan Ruiz gives us something better: a tableau of society in Spain during the picturesque, tumultuous reigns of Alfonso XI. and Peter the Cruel. While other writers sought their material in monastic libraries, he was content with joyous observation in inns, and booths, and shady places. He mingled with the general crowd, having his preferences, but few exclusions. He does not, indeed, seem to have loved Jews—pueblo de perdiçion—but his heart went out with a bound to their wives and daughters. For Jewish and Moorish dancing-girls he wrote countless songs—not preserved, unfortunately—to be accompanied by Moorish music. So, also, he composed ditties to be sung by blind men, by roystering students, by vagrant picaroons, and other birds of night. He records these artistic exploits with an air of frank self-satisfaction:—
Despues fise muchas cantigas de dança e troteras,
para judias e moras e para entenderas,
para en jnstrumentos de comunales maneras:
el cantar que non sabes, oylo acantaderas.
Cantares fis algunos de los que disen los siegos
e para escolares que andan nochernjegos
e para muchos otros por puertas andariegos,
caçurros e de bulrras, non cabrian en dyes priegos.