was first written as early as 1368, we are still twenty years after Don Juan Manuel’s time. There may be romances which in their original form were written before these two; but, if so, they are unrecognisable. The authentic romances lived only in oral tradition; they were not thought worth writing down, and they were not printed till late in the day. The older a romance is, the more unlikely it is to reach us unchanged. No existing romance, in its present form, can be referred to any period earlier than the fifteenth century, and romances of this date are comparatively rare.
The first to mention this class of composition is Santillana in his well-known letter to the Constable of Portugal written shortly before 1450, and he dismisses the popular balladists with all the disdain of a gentleman who writes at his ease. ‘Contemptible poets are those who without any order, rule or rhythm make those songs and romances in which low folk, and of menial station, take delight.’ A cause must be prospering before it is denounced in this fashion, and it may therefore be assumed that many romances were current when Santillana delivered judgment. Writing in 1492 and quoting from the Lancelot ballad already mentioned, Nebrija speaks of it as ‘aquel romance antiguo’; but ‘old’ has a very relative meaning, and Nebrija may have thought that a ballad composed fifty years earlier deserved to be called ‘old.’ At any rate, the oldest romances no doubt took their final form between the time of Santillana’s youth and Nebrija’s, and the introduction of printing into Spain has saved some of these for us. But—it must be said again and again—they are comparatively few in number, and no Spanish ballad is anything like as ancient as our own Judas ballad which exists in a thirteenth-century manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Santillana slightly overstates his case when he speaks of those who composed romances as ‘contemptible poets’ catering for the rabble. We have seen that Rodrígue de la Cámara and Carvajal both wrote romances in the fourth or fifth decade of the fifteenth century. Santillana cannot have meant to speak contemptuously of his two contemporaries, one a poet at the Castilian court of Juan II., and the other a poet at the Neapolitan court of Alfonso V. of Aragón; he evidently knew nothing of these artistic romances, and would have been pained to hear that educated men countenanced such stuff. No doubt other educated men besides Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal wrote in the popular manner; possibly the Lancelot ballad quoted by Nebrija is the work of some court-poet: the conditions were changing, and—though Santillana was perhaps unaware of it—the romances were rising in esteem. But Santillana is right as regards the earlier period. The primitive writers of popular romances were men of humble station, the impoverished representatives of those who had sung the cantares de gesta. These cantares de gesta were worked into the substance of histories and chronicles, and then went out of fashion. The juglares or singers came down in the world; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they had been welcome at courts and castles where they chanted long epics; by the fourteenth century they sang corrupt abridgments of these epics to less distinguished audiences; by the fifteenth century the epical songs were broken up. The themes were kept alive by oral tradition in the shape of shorter lyrical narratives, and these transformed fragments of the old epics were the primitive romances condemned by Santillana.
The subjects of these popular ballads were historical or legendary characters like Roderick, Bernardo del Carpio, the Counts of Castile, Fernán González, the Infantes of Lara, the Cid and his lieutenant, and other local heroes. Later on, the nameless poets of the people were tempted to deal with the sinister stories which crystallised round the name of Peter the Cruel, the long struggle against the Moors, episodes famous in the Arthurian legends and the books of chivalry, exploits recorded in the chronicles of foreign countries, miscellaneous incidents borrowed from diverse sources. It was gradually recognised that the popular instinct had discovered a most effective vehicle of poetic expression; more educated versifiers followed the lead of Rodríguez de la Cámara and Carvajal, but with a certain shamefaced air. The collections of romances published by Alonso de Fuentes and Lorenzo de Sepúlveda (in 1550 and 1551 respectively) are mainly the work of lettered courtiers who, like the ‘Cæsarean Knight’—the Caballero Cesáreo who contributed to the second edition of Sepúlveda’s book—are conscious of their condescension, and withhold their names, under the quaint delusion that they are ‘reserved for greater things.’
But this bashfulness soon wore off. Before the end of the sixteenth century famous writers like Lope de Vega and Góngora proved themselves to be masters of the ballad-form, and within a comparatively short while there came into existence the mass of romances which fill the two volumes of the Romancero general published in 16OO and 1605. The best of these are brilliant performances; but they are late, artistic imitations. For genuine old popular romances we must look in broadsides, or in the collections issued at Antwerp and Saragossa in the middle of the sixteenth century by Martín Nucio and Esteban de Nájera respectively. We may also read them (with a good deal more) in the Primavera y Flor de romances edited by Wolf and Hofmann; and, most conveniently of all, in the amplified reprint of the Primavera for which we are indebted to Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, the most eminent of living Spanish scholars. But the romances—not all of them very ancient—in the amplified Primavera fill three volumes; and, as it would be impossible to examine them one by one, it has occurred to me that the only practical plan is to take Lockhart as a basis, and to comment briefly on the ballads represented in his volume of translations—which I see some of you consulting. There may be occasion, also, to point out some omissions.
Lockhart begins with a translation of a romance quoted in Don Quixote by Ginés de Pasamonte, after the destruction of his puppet-show by the scandalised knight:—
Las huestes de don Rodrigo desmayaban y huian.[12]
[85] The English rendering, though not very exact throughout, is adequate and spirited enough:—
The hosts of Don Rodrigo were scattered in dismay,
When lost was the eighth battle, nor heart nor hope had they;