Short Bibliography of Works in English dealing with Spanish Romance
Preface
Since the days of Southey the romantic literature of Spain has not received from English writers and critics the amount of study and attention it undoubtedly deserves. In no European country did the seeds of Romance take root so readily or blossom so speedily and luxuriantly as in Spain, which perhaps left the imprint of its national character more deeply upon the literature of chivalry than did France or England. When we think of chivalry, do we not think first of Spain, of her age-long struggle against the pagan invaders of Europe, her sensitiveness to all that concerned personal and national honour, of the names of the Cid Campeador, Gayferos, and Gonzalvo de Cordova, gigantic shadows in harness, a pantheon of heroes, which the martial legends of few lands can equal and none surpass. The epic of our British Arthur, the French chansons de gestes, are indebted almost as much to folklore as to the imagination of the singers who first gave them literary shape. But in the romances of Spain we find that folklore plays an inconsiderable part, and that her chivalric fictions are either the offspring of historic happenings or of that brilliant and glowing imagination which illumines the whole expanse of Peninsular literature.
I have given more space to the proofs of connexion between the French chansons de gestes and the Spanish cantares de gesta than most of my predecessors who have written of Castilian romantic story. Indeed, with the exception of Mr Fitzmaurice Kelly, whose admirable work in the field of Spanish letters forms so happy an exception to our national neglect of a great literature, I am aware of no English writer who has concerned himself with this subject. My own opinion regarding the almost total lack of Moorish influence upon the Spanish romanceros is in consonance with that of critics much better qualified to pass judgment upon such a question. But for my classification of the ballad I am indebted to no one, and this a long devotion to the study of ballad literature perhaps entitles me to make. I can claim, too, that my translations are not mere paraphrases, but provide renderings of tolerable accuracy.
I have made an earnest endeavour to provide English readers with a conspectus of Spanish romantic literature as expressed in its cantares de gesta, its chivalric novels, its romanceros or ballads, and some of its lighter aspects. The reader will find full accounts and summaries of all the more important works under each of these heads, many of which have never before been described in English.
If the perusal of this book leads to the more general study of the noble and useful Castilian tongue on the part of but a handful of those who read it, its making will have been justified. The real brilliance and beauty of these tales lie behind the curtains of a language unknown to most British people, and can only be liberated by the spell of study. This book contains merely the poor shadows and reflected wonders of screened and hidden marvels.
L. S.
Edinburgh
June 1920
Illustrations
Page
The Cid bids farewell to his Wife Frontispiece
A Glimpse of Old Spain 16
A “Trovador” of Old Spain 50
The Cid in Battle 64
Elisena and Perion behold one another 96
The Firm Island 112
The Proud Circumstance of Chivalry 132
Palmerin encounters Fairies at the Edge of the Wood 172
Partenopex in Melior’s Chamber 190
Don Roderic is tempted by a Semblance of Cava 210
Count Alarcos meets his Wife and Children at the Gate of the Castle 218
Aben Habuz and the Captive Princess 272
The Three Princesses watch the Approach of the White-sailed Galley 286
Don Alfonso summons his Sages 308
Torralva and the Spirits 338
Don Quixote’s Love-madness 360
Chapter I: The Sources of Spanish Romance
Romance, Romance, the songs of France,
The gestes of fair Britaine,
The legends of the sword and lance
That grew in Alemaine,
Pale at thy rich inheritance,
Thou splendour of old Spain!
Anon.
If, spent with journeying, a stranger should seat himself in some garden in old Granada, and from beneath a tenting of citron and mulberry leaves open his ears to the melody of the waters of the City of Pomegranates and his spirit to the sorcery of its atmosphere, he will gladly believe that in the days when its colours were less mellow and its delicious air perhaps less reposeful the harps of its poets were the looms upon which the webs of romance were woven. Almost instinctively he will form the impression that the Spaniard, having regained this paradise after centuries of exile, and stirred by the enchanted echoes of Moorish music which still lingered there, was roused into passionate song in praise of those heroes of his race who had warred so ceaselessly and sacrificed so much to redeem it. But if he should climb the Sierra del Sol and pass through the enchanted chambers of the Alhambra as a child passes through the courts of dream, he will say in his heart that the men who builded these rooms from the rainbow and painted these walls from the palette of the sunset raised also the invisible but not less gorgeous palace of Spanish Romance.
Or if one, walking in the carven shadows of Cordova, think on the mosque Maqsura, whose doors of Andalusian brass opened to generations of poets and astrologers, or on the palace of Azzahra, built of rose and sea-coloured marbles rifled from the Byzantine churches of Ifrikia, will he not believe that in this city of shattered splendours and irretrievable spells the passion-flower of Romance burst forth full-blown?
But we cannot trace the first notes of the forgotten musics nor piece together the mosaic of broken harmonies in the warm and sounding cities of the Saracens, neither in “that mine of silk and silver,” old Granada, nor among the marble memories of Cordova, whose market-place overflowed with the painted parchments of Moorish song and science. We must turn our backs on the scarlet southern land and ascend to the bare heights of Castile and Asturias, where Christian Spain, prisoned for half a thousand years upon a harsh and arid plateau, and wrought to a high passion
