Spain owed much to the Moor, however, from other causes. The Arabs were a learned and refined race. They built cities, palaces, and mosques; they founded universities, they encouraged learning. The most eminent scholars came from the East to grace their schools, and introduced a spirit of inquiry and a love of knowledge which survived their power. Abdorrhaman III. founded the university at Cordova. He established schools and collected a library, it is said, to the extent of six hundred thousand volumes. The blessings of civilisation was fostered by the Omajad dynasty. Mahometanism never flourished with such true glory as under the Spanish caliphs.
One of the most remarkable circumstances of this era is, the prosperity and learning of the Jews settled in Spain. Persecuted by the Goths[4], this hapless nation doubtless welcomed the Moors gladly; and finding toleration under their rule, and their schools open to them, they flocked to the universities of Cordova and Toledo in such numbers, that one Jewish writer tells us that there were twelve thousand Israelitish students at Toledo; and they gave evidence of the perseverance, sagacity, and talent which belong to that people, and which, fostered by the blessed spirit of toleration, bore worthy fruit.
A succession of Hebrew scholars may be traced from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries. De Castro gives an account of seven hundred different works. Every Jew could read. The higher classes flourished in glory and prosperity, so that many of the noblest Spanish families include Jewish sprouts in the tree of their genealogy. Even to this day the Jews' sons of those driven from Spain to this country remember their Spanish renown, and have preserved a recollection of its language.
Of the Arabic authors of Spain the greater portion were natives of Andalusia. The number of their poets was very considerable. Of the Romances Moriscos doubtless many originated in Arabic poetry. The old Roman rhythm, the Gothic love of music, the Arab chivalry, and the noble spirit generated by a generous love of freedom, were the sources of these romances. Before we recur to them however, we will mention the connection between the troubadour and Provençal poetry with the Valentian. It is a singular anomaly, we may almost call it, in literature, that a dialect become a written one, adorned by poets and spoken through extensive provinces, should have become the dead tongue of modern times. The French, Italian, and Castillian absorbed the genius that once took form in a tongue which, whether it be called Provençal, Limousin, or Valentian, is still the same, and in it were written the earliest modern verses. Petrarch and Dante raised their native tongue in opposition; but the poetry they studied as anterior to their own was the Provençal. The peculiar tone of troubadour poetry; the refined and somewhat abstract mode in which love is treated, was adopted by Petrarch, and by Dante also, in his sonnets and canzoni. The rhythm and the subjects were more artful and scientific than the songs of Castille, and thus at one time it was held in higher regard by the Spanish sovereigns who wished to introduce learning and poetry among their subjects. John I. of Arragon invited many Provençal and Narbonne poets to settle at Barcelona and Tortosa. He established an academy in the former city for the cultivation of poetry. The Spanish troubadours became celebrated; [Mosen Jordi de Sant Jordi] is one of the first and best-known. Petrarch read and, perhaps, imitated him.[5]
Though protected and encouraged by the sovereigns of Arragon, and read and lauded, and even imitated, by the nobles of their courts, the Valentian never became the national poetry of Spain, and we turn from poets who will find better place among the early French writers to the genuine productions of Castille.
We have seen that it was during the Moorish wars, under the successors of Don Pelayo, that these romances had birth. The kings of the various provinces of Spain, ever at war with the Moors, were, of course, in a state of great dependence on their warrior nobles. They needed their subjects to form expeditions against the enemy or to resist their encroachments. Often, also, the Spanish princes were at enmity with each other; and civil discord, or the war of one Christian kingdom against the other, caused temporary alliance with the Mahometans. This brought the chivalry of the two nations into contact. The Spaniards learned the arts of civilisation from their conquerors—they learned also the language of love.
In the midst of these romantic wars, there sprung up a species of poetry which in its simplicity and truth resembles the old English ballads, but which, from the nature of the events it commemorates, is conceived in a loftier and more chivalrous tone. The most ancient of these is a poem on the Cid, written an hundred and fifty years before the time of Dante: its versification is barbarous. It was written in the infancy of language; but it displays touches of nature, and a vivacity of action, that show it to have been the work of men of an heroic and virile age.
By degrees the romances or ballads of Spain assumed a lighter and more tripping rhythm, fitter to be easily remembered and to be accompanied by music. These metrical compositions were called redondillas.[6] Boutervek imagines that they may be considered as a relic of the songs of the Roman soldiers. There was something singularly popular in their freedom from constraint, and catching in their effect on the ear. The sonorous harmony of the Spanish language gave them dignity; they were easy to compose, easy to remember; they required only a subject, and the words flowed, as it were, with the facility of a running stream.
There are several volumes, called [the Cancionero] general and Romancero general, filled with these compositions. The most singular circumstance is, that they are nearly all anonymous. No doubt, as language improved, they were altered and amended from oral tradition, and no one had a right to claim undivided authorship. Their subjects were love and war, and came home to the heart of every Spaniard: the sentiments were simple, yet heroic; the action was always impassioned, and sometimes tragic.
Doctor Bowring, who has a happy facility in rendering the poetry of foreign nations into our own, has been more felicitous than any other author in translating these compositions. His volume is well known, and we will not quote largely from it, as we are tempted. One poem, which Boutervek pronounces to be untranslatable through its airiness and lightness, we present as a specimen of that talent, so peculiar to the redondilla, of catching and portraying a sentiment, as it were, by sketches and hints, where the reader fills up the picture from his own imagination, and is pleased by the very vagueness which incites him to exert that faculty.