With scarcely an exception, the ‘Moorish ballads’ show no trace of Moorish origin, and with very few exceptions, they are not popular ballads. They are clever, artificial presentations of the picturesque Moor as suggested in the anonymous Historia de Abindarraez, and elaborated by Pérez de Hita. We do not put it too high in saying that Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada—the earliest historical novel—is responsible for all the impossible Moors and incredible Moorish women of poetry and fiction.
Unmask me now these faces,
Unmuffle me these Moorish men, and eke these dancing Graces...
To give ye merry Easter I’ll make my meaning plain,
Mayhap it never struck you, we have Christians here in Spain.
But Góngora’s voice was as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The tide rose, overflowed the Pyrenees, floated Mademoiselle de Scudéri’s Almahide and Madame de Lafayette’s Zaïde into fashion, and did not ebb till long after Washington Irving followed Pérez de Hita’s lead by ascribing his graceful, fantastic Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada to a non-existent historian whom he chose to call Fray Antonio Agapida. The Moor of fiction is so much more attractive than the Moor of history that he has imposed himself upon the world. Most of us still see him, with the light of other days around him, as we first met him in Scott’s Talisman, or in Chateaubriand’s Aventures du dernier Abencérage. Still the fact remains that he is a conventional lay-figure, and that a Spanish poem in which he appears transfigured and glorified is neither ancient nor popular, but is necessarily the work of some late Spanish writer who knows no more of Moors than he can gather from Pérez de Hita’s gorgeously imaginative pages.
No serious fault can be found with Lockhart’s selection of what he calls ‘Romantic Ballads.’ Most of them are excellent examples, though The Moor Calaynos, an abbreviated rendering of
Ya cabalga Calaynos á la sombra de una oliva,[76]
is no longer ‘generally believed to be among the most ancient’ ballads. It was certainly widely known, as Lockhart says, for tags from it have become proverbs; but it mentions Prester John and the Sultan of Babylon, and these personages are unknown to genuine old popular poetry. According to Milá y Fontanals and Sr. Menéndez y Pelayo, the Calaínos ballad is one of the latest in the [113] Charlemagne cycle, and is derived from a Provençal version of Fierabras. On the other hand, the original of The Escape of Gayferos—
Estábase la condesa en su estrado asentada[77]—