The Romancero has been described, in a phrase attributed to Lope de Vega, as ‘an Iliad without a Homer.’ More prosaically, it is a collection of romances; and, before going further, it may be as well to observe that the meaning of the word romance has become much restricted in course of time. Originally used to designate the varieties of speech derived from Latin, it was applied later only to the body of written literature in the different vernaculars of Romania, and then, by another limitation, it was applied solely to poems written in these languages. Lastly, the meaning of the word was still further narrowed in Spanish, and a romance has now come to mean a special form of verse-composition—an epical-lyric poem arranged primarily in lines of sixteen syllables with one assonance sustained throughout. There are occasional variants from the type. Some few romances have a refrain; in some of the oldest romances there is a change of assonance: but the normal form of the genuine popular romances is what I have just described it to be. There should be no mistake on this point, and yet a mistake may easily be made. Though the metrical structure of these popular Spanish ballads had been demonstrated as far back as 1815 by Grimm in his Silva de romances viejos, so good a scholar as Agustín Durán—to whom we owe the largest existing collection of romances—has printed them in such a shape as to give the impression [78] that they were written in octosyllabics of which only the even lines (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.) are assonanced. Moreover, he expounds this theory in his Discurso preliminar, and his view is supported by the high authority of Wolf.[6] Still, it cannot be maintained. It is undoubtedly true that the later artistic ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, written by professional poets like Lope de Vega and Góngora, were composed in the form which Durán describes. We are not concerned this afternoon, however, with these brilliant artificial imitations, but with the authentic, primitive ballads of the people. These old Spanish romances, I repeat, are written normally in lines of sixteen syllables, every line ending in a uniform assonance. They should be printed so as to make this clear, and indeed they are so printed by the celebrated scholar Antonio de Nebrija who, in his Gramática sobre la lengua castellana (1492), quotes three lines from one of the Lancelot ballads:—
Digas tu el ermitaño que hazes la vida santa:
Aquel ciervo del pie blanco donde haze su morada.
Por aqui passo esta noche un hora antes del alva.
There are other erroneous theories respecting the romances against which you should be warned at the outset. Sancho Panza, in his pleasant way, informed the Duchess that these ballads were ‘too old to lie’; but he gives no particulars as to their age, and thereby shows his wisdom. Most English readers who are not specialists take their information on the subject from Lockhart’s Introduction to his Ancient Spanish Ballads, a volume containing free translations of fifty-three romances, published in 1823. Lockhart, who drew most of his material from Depping,[7] probably knew as much about the matter as any one of his time in England; but, though we move slowly in our Spanish studies, we make some progress, and Lockhart’s opinions on certain points relating to the romances are no longer tenable. He notes, for example, that the Cancionero general contains ‘several pieces which bear the name of Don Juan Manuel,’ identifies this writer with the author of the Conde Lucanor, states that these pieces ‘are among the most modern in the collection,’ and naturally concludes that most of the remaining pieces must have been written long before 1348, the year of Don Juan Manuel’s death. Lockhart goes on to observe that the Moors undoubtedly exerted ‘great and remarkable influence over Spanish thought and feeling—and therefore over Spanish language and poetry’; and, though he does not say so in precise terms, he leaves the impression that this reputed Arabic influence is visible in the Spanish romances. These views, widely held in Lockhart’s day, are now abandoned by all competent scholars; but unfortunately they still prevail among the general public.
Milá y Fontanals, who incidentally informs us that Corneille was the first foreigner to quote a Spanish romance,[8] states that these theories as to the antiquity and Arabic origin of the romances were first advanced by another foreigner—Pierre-Daniel Huet, Bishop of Avranches—towards the end of the seventeenth century.[9] But they made little way till 1820, when the theory of Arabic origin was confidently reiterated by Conde in his Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España. Conde’s scholarship has been declared inadequate by later Orientalists, and the rest of us must be content to accept the verdict of these experts who alone have any right to an opinion on the matter. But it cannot be disputed that Conde had the knack of presenting a case plausibly, and of passing off a conjecture for a fact. Hence he made many converts who perhaps exaggerated his views. It is just possible—though unlikely—that there may be some slight relation between an Arabic zajal and such a Spanish composition as the serranilla quoted in the last lecture:—
¡Sí ganada es Antequera!
¡Oxalá Granada fuera!
¡Sí me levantara un dia
por mirar bien Antequera!