[46] Petrarch complains, in one of his letters from the country, that "jurisconsults and divines, nay his own valet, had taken to rhyming; and he was afraid the very cattle might begin to low in verse;" apud De Sade, Mémoires pour la Vie de Pétrarque, tom. iii. p. 243.
[47] Andres, Letteratura, part. 1, cap. 11.—Yet this popular assertion is contradicted by Reinesius, who states, that both Homer and Pindar were translated into Arabic by the middle of the eighth century. See Fabricius, Bibliotheca Graeca, (Hamb. 1712-38,) tom. xii. p. 753.
[48] Sir William Jones, Traité sur la Poésie Orientale, sec. 2.—Sismondi says that Sir W. Jones is mistaken in citing the history of Timour by Ebn. Arabschah, as an Arabic epic. (Littérature du Midi, tom. i. p. 57.) It is Sismondi who is mistaken, since the English critic states that the Arabs have no heroic poem, and that this poetical prose history is not accounted such even by the Arabs themselves.
[49] It would require much more learning than I am fortified with, to enter into the merits of the question, which has been raised respecting the probable influence of the Arabian on the literature of Europe. A. V. Schlegel, in a work of little bulk, but much value, in refuting with his usual vivacity the extravagant theory of Andres, has been led to conclusions of an opposite nature, which may be thought perhaps scarcely less extravagant. (Observations sur la Langue et la Littérature Provençales, p. 64.) It must indeed seem highly improbable that the Saracens, who, during the Middle Ages, were so far superior in science and literary culture to the Europeans, could have resided so long in immediate contact with them, and in those very countries indeed which gave birth to the most cultivated poetry of that period, without exerting some perceptible influence upon it. Be this as it may, its influence on the Castilian cannot reasonably be disputed. This has been briefly traced by Conde in an "Essay on Oriental Poetry," Poesia Oriental, whose publication he anticipates in the Preface to his "History of the Spanish Arabs," but which still remains in manuscript. (The copy I have used is in the library of Mr. George Ticknor.) He professes in this work to discern in the earlier Castilian poetry, in the Cid, the Alexander, in Berceo's, the arch-priest of Hita's, and others of similar antiquity, most of the peculiarities and varieties of Arabian verse; the same cadences and number of syllables, the same intermixture of assonances and consonances, the double hemistich and prolonged repetition of the final rhyme. From the same source he derives much of the earlier rural minstrelsy of Spain, as well as the measures of its romances and seguidillas; and in the Preface to his History, he has ventured on the bold assertion, that the Castilian owes so much of its vocabulary to the Arabic, that it may be almost accounted a dialect of the latter. Conde's criticisms, however, must be quoted with reserve. His habitual studies had given him such a keen relish for Oriental literature, that he was, in a manner, denaturalized from his own.
[50] Byron's beautiful line may seem almost a version of Conde's Spanish text, "sucesos de armas y de amores con muy estraños lances y en elegante estilo."—Dominacion de los Arabes, tom. i. p. 457.
[51] Sismondi, in his Littérature du Midi, (tom. i. pp. 267 et seq.), and more fully in his Républiques Italiennes, (tom. xvi. pp. 448 et seq.), derives the jealousy of the sex, the ideas of honor, and the deadly spirit of revenge, which distinguished the southern nations of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from the Arabians. Whatever be thought of the jealousy of the sex, it might have been supposed that the principles of honor and the spirit of revenge might, without seeking further, find abundant precedent in the feudal habits and institutions of our European ancestors.
[52] "Quas perversivnes potius, quam versiones meritó dixeris." Bibliotheca Escurialensis, tom. i. p. 266.
CHAPTER IX.
WAR OF GRANADA.—SURPRISE OF ZAHARA.—CAPTURE OF ALHAMA.
1481-1482.