are based on passages in cantares de gesta as chronicles; folk-ballads of a later date, more or less altered; and, lastly, the more modern productions of conscious art.
I also believe that the ballads or romanceros are again of two broad classes: those of spontaneous folk-origin, owing nothing to literary sources, and those which are mainly cantares de gesta, or chronicle passages in a lyric state of attrition. With the great body of authorities upon ancient Spanish literature I do not believe that the cantares or chronicles owe anything to the ballads of any age, which seem to me wholly of popular origin. Of course the two classes lastly indicated do not include the more ‘poetic’ or sophisticated ballads written after the ballad became an accepted form for experiments in conscious versification, and it is plain that such efforts could belong to neither category.
No definite proof exists as to the degree of sophistication and alteration which the ballads underwent before their ultimate collection and publication. It would be strange, however, if no ballads of relatively early date had reached us, altered or otherwise, and it seems to me merely a piece of critical affectation to deny antiquity to a song solely because it found its way into print at a late period, or because it is not encountered in ancient MSS., just as it would be to throw doubt upon the antiquity of a legend or folk-custom current in our own day—unless; indeed, such should display obvious marks of recent manufacture. At the same time few of these ballads seem to me to bear the stamp of an antiquity more hoary than, for example, those of Scotland or Denmark.
Few of the ballad systems of Europe are better worthy of study than that of Spain. But in this place we are considering it merely from the point of view of its bearings upon Romance. That it has a close affinity with the Romantic literature of the Peninsula is evident from the name given to these poems by the Spaniards, who call them romanceros.18 Some of them are, indeed, romances or cantares de gesta in little, and in fact they deal with all the great subjects sung of in the cantares or prosed upon in the chronicles, such as the Cid, Bernaldo de Carpio, Count Alarcos, and so forth. But they seem to have little in common with the later romances proper, such as Amadis, Palmerin, or Felixmarte, for the good reason that by the time these were in fashion the ballad had become the sole property of the common people. As the Marquis de Santillana (1398–1458), himself a poet of note, remarks in a letter famous for the light it throws on the condition of Spanish literature in his day: “There are contemptible poets who, without order, rule, or rhythm, make those songs and romances in which vulgar folk and menials take delight.” So might Lovelace or Drummond of Hawthornden have written of our own balladeers.
The ballads thus relegated to the peasantry and lower classes, those of the upper classes who found time for reading were accordingly thrown back upon the chronicles and the few cantares de gesta which had been reduced to writing. But on the destruction of the Moorish states in Spain the increase in wealth and leisure among the upper classes, and the introduction of printing, aroused a demand for books which would provide amusement. A great spirit of invention was abroad. At first it resuscitated the Romantic matter lying embedded and almost fossilized in the chronicles. It is, indeed, but a step from some of these to the romances proper. But Spain hungrily craved novelty, and the eyes of romance-makers were turned once more to France, whose fictional wealth began to be exploited by Spanish writers about the beginning of the fifteenth century.
The Heyday of Romance
Perhaps the first literary notice that we possess of the romance proper in Spain is that by Ayala, Chancellor of Castile (d. 1407), who, in his Rimado de Palacio, deplores the time he has wasted in reading such “lying stuff” as Amadis de Gaul. He might have been much worse occupied, but, be that as it may, in his dictum we scarcely have a forecast of the manner in which this especial type of romance was to seize so mightily upon the Castilian imagination, which, instead of being content with mere servile copying from French models, was to re-endow them with a spirit and genius peculiarly Spanish. Perhaps in no other European country did the seed of Romance find a soil so fitting for its germination and fruition, and certainly nowhere did it blossom and burgeon in such an almost tropical luxuriance of fruit and flower.
Amadis had for sequel a long line of similar tales, all of which the reader will encounter later in these pages. By general consent of critics, from Cervantes onward, it is the best and most distinctive of the Spanish romances, and was translated into French, Italian, and indeed into most European languages,19 a special translation, it is said, even being made for Jewish readers. At a stroke Peninsular romanticism had beaten French chivalric fiction upon its own ground. But Amadis was not, as Cervantes seems to think, the first book of chivalry printed in Spain, for this distinction belongs to Tirante the White (1490) which, according to Southey, is lacking in the spirit of chivalry.20 Among other figures it introduces that of Warwick the King-maker, who successfully withstands an invasion of England by the King of the Canary Islands, and ultimately slays the invader single-handed and routs his forces. But if Cervantes errs in his bibliography, his barber’s summing-up of Amadis as “the best of all books of its kind that has been written” is not far from the truth.21 Tasso thought it “the most beautiful and perhaps the most profitable story of its kind that can be read.” Did he merely follow the tonsorial critic’s opinion, as his language would tempt one to believe?
Amadis was followed by a host of imitations. Its enormous success, from a popular point of view, brought into being a whole literature of similar stamp and intention, if not of equal quality. The first of such efforts, in consequence if not in chronology, is that of Palmerin de Oliva, the earliest known edition of which appeared at Seville in 1525, and was followed, like the Amadis, by similar continuations, Primaleón, Platir, and Palmerin of England, perhaps the best of the series.22 Regarding the alleged Portuguese origin of Amadis and Palmerin I have more to say elsewhere, and will content myself here by observing that no Portuguese original, printed or manuscript, exists, although the priority of such seems undoubted. But these romances became as Castilian as the Arthurian series became English, despite the latter’s Brythonic or other origin, and Spanish they have remained in the belief and imagination of all Europe, popular as well as critical.
The Palmerin series only fed and increased the passion for romantic fiction, so hungry was Spain for a literary diet which seemed so natural and acceptable to her appetite that those who sought to provide her with romantic reading could scarce cope with the call for it. The natural result ensued. A perfect torrent of hastily written and inferior fiction descended upon the public. Invention, at first bold, became shameless, and in such absurdities of distorted imagination as Belianis of Greece, Olivante de Laura, and Felixmarte of Hyrcania the summit of romantic extravagance was reached. But ridiculous and insulting to human intelligence and decent taste as most of these productions were, still they found countless thousands of readers, and there is every indication that publishing in the Spain of the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries must have been extremely lucrative. These preposterous and chimerical tales, lacking the beauty and true imaginative skill and simplicity of the older romances, stood in much the same relation to them as a host of imitative novels published in the early years of the nineteenth century did to the romances of Scott. Mexia, the sarcastic historian of Charles V, writing of romance in 1545, deplores the public credulity which battened on such feeble stuff. “For,” he says, “there be men who think all these things really happened, just as they read or hear them, though the greater part of the things themselves are absurd.” So might a critic of our own day descant upon the popular predilection for the cheap novel,
