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If we reject the claim of Lope de Moros to be the author of the Razón feita d'Amor, the first Castilian poet whose name reaches us is Gonzalo de Berceo (?1198-?1264), a secular priest attached to the Benedictine monastery of San Millán de la Cogolla, in the diocese of Calahorra. A few details are known of him. He was certainly a deacon in 1220, and his name occurs in documents between 1237 and 1264. He speaks of his advanced age in the Vida de Santa Oria, Virgen, his latest and perhaps most finished work; and his birthplace, Berceo, is named in his Historia del Señor San Millán de Cogolla, as in his rhymed biography of St. Dominic of Silas. His copiousness runs to some thirteen thousand lines, including, besides the works already named, the Sacrificio de la Misa (Sacrifice of the Mass), the Martirio de San Lorenzo (Martyrdom of St. Lawrence), the Loores de Nuestra Señora (Praises of Our Lady), the Signos que aparecerán ante del Juicio (Signs visible before the Judgment), the Milagros de Nuestra Señora (Miracles of Our Lady), the Duelo que hizo la Virgen María el día de la Pasión de su hijo Jesucristo (The Virgin's Lament on the day of her Son's Passion), and three hymns to the Holy Ghost, the Virgin, and God the Father. In most editions of Berceo there is appended to his verses a poem in his praise, attributed to an unknown writer of the fourteenth century. This poem is, in fact, conjectured to be an invention of Tomás Antonio Sánchez, the earliest editor of Berceo's complete works (1779). The chances are that Berceo and his writings had passed out of remembrance within two hundred years of his death, and he was evidently unknown to Santillana in the fifteenth century. But a brief extract from him is given in the Moisén Segundo (Second Moses) of Ambrosio Gómez, published in 1653. With the exception of the Martirio de San Lorenzo, of which the end is lost, all Berceo's writings have been preserved, and he suffers by reason of his exuberance.

He sings in the vernacular, he declares, being too unlearned in the Latin; but he has his little pretensions. Though he calls himself a juglar, he marks the differences between his dictados (poems) and the cantares (songs) of a plain juglar, and he vindicates his title by that monotonous metre—the cuaderna vía—which was taken up in the Libro de Apolonio and became the model of all learned clerks in the next generations. Berceo uses the rhythm with success, and if his results are not splendid, it was not because he lacked perseverance. On the contrary, his industry was only too formidable. And, as a little of the mono-rhymed quatrain goes far, he must have perished had he depended upon execution. Beside Dante's achievement, as Puymaigre notes, the paraphrases of Berceo in the Sacrificio de la Misa (stanzas 250–266) seem thin and pale; but the comparison is unfair to the earlier Castilian singer, who died in his obscure hamlet without the advantage of Dante's splendid literary tradition. Berceo is hampered by his lack of imagination, by the poverty of his conditions, by the absence of models, by the narrow circle of his subjects, and by the pious scruples which hindered him from arabesquing the original design. Yet he possesses the gifts of simplicity and of unction, and amid his long digressions into prosy theological commonplace there are flashes of mystic inspiration unmatched by any other poet of his country and his time. Even when his versification, clear but hard, is at its worst, he accomplishes the end which he desires by popularising the pious legends which were dear to him. He was not—never could have been—a great poet. But in his own way he was, if not an inventor, the chief of a school, and the necessary predecessor of such devout authors as Luis de León and St. Teresa. He was a pioneer in the field of devout pastoral, with all the defects of the inexperienced explorer; and, for the most part, he had nothing to guide him but his own uncultured instinct. Some specimen of his work may be given in Hookham Frere's little-known fragmentary version of the Vida de San Millán:—

"He walked those mountains wild, and lived within that nook

For forty years and more, nor ever comfort took

Of offer'd food or alms, or human speech a look;

No other saint in Spain did such a penance brook.

For many a painful year he pass'd the seasons there,

And many a night consumed in penitence and prayer—

In solitude and cold, with want and evil fare,

His thoughts to God resigned, and free from human care.

Oh! sacred is the place, the fountain and the hill,

The rocks where he reposed, in meditation still,

The solitary shades through which he roved at will:

His presence all that place with sanctity did fill."

This is Berceo in a very characteristic vein, dealing with his own special saint in his chosen way—the way of the "new mastery"; and he keeps to the same rhythm in the nine hundred odd stanzas which he styles the Milagros de Nuestra Señora. Here his devotion inspires him to more conscientious effort; and it has been sought to show that Berceo takes his tales as he finds them in the Miracles de la Sainte Vierge, by the French trouvère, Gautier de Coinci, Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne (1177–1236). Certain it is that Gautier's source, the Soissons manuscript, was known to Alfonso the Learned, who mentions it in the sixty-first of his Galician songs as "a book full of miracles":—

"En Seixons … un liuro a todo cheo de miragres."

There were doubtless earlier Latin collections—amongst others, Vincent de Beauvais' Speculum historiale and Pothon's Liber de miraculis Sanctæ Dei Genitricis Mariæ—which both Berceo and Alfonso used. But since Alfonso, a middle-aged man when Berceo died, knew the Soissons collection, it seems possible that Berceo also handled it. A close examination of his text converts the bare possibility into something approaching certainty. Of Berceo's twenty-five Marian legends, eighteen are given by Gautier de Coinci, whose total reaches fifty-five. This is not by itself final, for both writers might have selected them from a common source. Yet there are convincing proofs of imitation in the coincidences of thought and expression which are apparent in Gautier and Berceo. These are too numerous to be accidental; and still more weight must be given to the fact that in several cases where Gautier invents a detail of his own wit, Berceo reproduces it. Taken in conjunction with his known habit of strict adherence to his text, it follows that Berceo took Gautier for his guide. He did what all the world was doing in borrowing from the French, and in the Virgin's Lament he has the candour to confess the northern supremacy.

Still, it would be wrong to think that Berceo contents himself with mere servile reproduction, or that he trespasses in the manner of a vulgar plagiary. Seven of his legends he seeks elsewhere than in Gautier, and he takes it upon himself to condense his predecessor's diffuse narration. Thus, where Gautier needs 1350 lines to tell the legend of St. Ildefonsus, or 2090 to give the miracle of Theophilus, Berceo confines himself to 108 and to 657 lines. Gautier will spare you no detail; he will have you know the why, the when, the how, the paltriest circumstance of his pious story. Beside him Berceo shines by his power of selection, by his finer instinct for the essential, by his relative sobriety of tone, by his realistic eye, by his variety of resource in pure Castilian expression, by his richer melody, and by the fleeter movement of his action. In a word, with all his imperfections, Berceo approves himself the sounder craftsman of the two, and therefore he finds thirty readers where the Prior of Vic-sur-Aisne finds one. Small and few as his opportunities were, he rarely failed to use them to an advantage; as in the invention of the singular rhymed octosyllabic song—with its haunting refrain, Eya velar!—in the Virgin's Lament (stanzas 170–198). This argues a considerable lyrical gift, and the pity is that the most of Berceo's editors should have been at such pains to hide it from the reader.

In the ten thousand lines of the Libro de Alexandre are recounted the imaginary adventures of the Macedonian king, as told in Gautier de Lille's Alexandreis and in the versions of Lambert de Tort and Alexandre de Bernai. Traces of the Leonese dialect negative the ascription to Berceo, and the Juan Lorenzo Segura de Astorga mentioned in the last verses is a mere copyist. The Poema de Fernán González, due to a monk of San Pedro de Arlanza, embodies many picturesque and primitive legends in Berceo's manner. But the value of both these compositions is slight.

So much for verse. Castilian prose develops on parallel lines with it. A very early specimen is the didactic treatise called the Diez Mandamientos, written by a Navarrese monk, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, for the use of confessors. Somewhat later follow the Anales Toledanos, in two separate parts (the third is much more recent), composed between the years 1220 and 1250. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, Archbishop of Toledo (1170–1247), wrote a Latin Historia Gothica, which begins with the Gothic invasion, and ends at the year 1243. Undertaken at the bidding of St. Ferdinand of Castile, this work was summarised, and done into Castilian, probably by Jiménez de Rada himself, under the title of the Historia de los Godos. Its date would be the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, and to this same time (1241) belongs the Fuero Juzgo (Forum Judicum). This is a Castilian version of a code of so-called Gothic laws, substantially Roman in origin, given by St. Ferdinand (1200–1252) to the Spaniards settled in Córdoba and other southern cities after the reconquest; but though of extreme value to the philologer, its literary interest is too slight to detain us here. Two most brilliant specimens of early Spanish prose are the letters supposed to have been written by the dying Alexander to his mother; and the accident of their being found in the manuscript copied by Lorenzo Segura de Astorga has led to their being printed at the end of the Libro de Alexandre. There is good reason for thinking that they are not by the author of that poem; and, in truth, they are mere translations. Both letters are taken from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī's Arabic collection of moral sentences; the first is found in the Bonium (so called from its author, a mythical King of Persia), and the second on the Castilian version of the Secretum Secretorum, of which the very title is reproduced as Poridat de las Poridades. Further examples of progressive prose are found in the Libro de los doce Sabios, which deals with the political education of princes, and may have been drawn up by the direction of St. Ferdinand. But the authorship and date of these compilations are little better than conjectural.

These are the preliminary essays in the stuff of Spanish prose. Its permanent form was received at the hands of Alfonso the Learned (1226–84), who followed his father, St. Ferdinand, to the Castilian throne in 1252. Unlucky in his life, balked of his ambition to wear the title of Emperor, at war with Popes, his own brothers, his children, and his people, Alfonso has been hardly entreated after death. Mariana, the greatest of Spanish historians, condenses the vulgar verdict in a Tacitean phrase: Dum cœlum considerat terra amissit. A mountain of libellous myth has overlaid Alfonso's fame. Of all the anecdotes concerning him, the best known is that which reports him as saying, "Had God consulted me at the creation of the world, He would have made it differently." This deliberate invention is due to Pedro IV. (the Ceremonious); and if Pedro foresaw the result, he must have been a scoundrel of genius. Fortunately, nothing can rob Alfonso of his right to be considered, not only as the father of Castilian verse, but as the centre of all Spanish intellectual life. Political disaster never caused his intellectual activity to slacken. Like Bacon, he took all knowledge for his province, and in every department he shone pre-eminent. Astronomy, music, philosophy, canon and civil law, history, poetry, the study of languages: he forced his people upon these untrodden roads. To catalogue the series of his scientific enterprises, and to set down the names of his Jewish and Arab collaborators, would give ample work to a bibliographer. Both the Tablas Alfonsis and the colossal Libros del Saber de Astronomía (Books on the Science of Astronomy) are packed with minute corrections of Ptolemy, in whose system the learned King seems to have suspected an error; but their present interest lies in the historic fact, that with their compilation Castilian makes its first great stride in the direction of exactitude and clearness.

Similar qualities of precision and ease were developed in encyclopædic treatises like the Septenario[3] which, together with the Fuero Juzgo, Alfonso drew up in his father's lifetime; and in practical guides such as the Juegos de Açedrex, Dados, et Tablas (Book of Chess, Dice, and Chequers). This miraculous activity astounded contemporaries, and posterity has multiplied the wonder by attributing well-nigh every possible anonymous work to the man whose real activity is a marvel. It has been sought to prove him the author of the Libro de Alexandre, the writer of Alexander's Letters, the compiler of treatises on the chase, the translator of Kalilah and Dimnah, and innumerable more pieces. Not one of these can be brought home to him, and some belong to a later time. Ticknor, again, foists on Alfonso two separate works each entitled the Tesoro, and the authorship has been accepted upon that authority. It is therefore necessary to state the real case. The one Tesoro is a prose translation of Brunetto Latini's Li Livres dou Trésor made by Alfonso de Paredes and Pero Gómez, respectively surgeon and secretary at the court of Sancho, Alfonso's son and successor; the other Tesoro, with its prose preamble and forty-eight stanzas, is a forgery vamped by some parasite in the train of Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo, during the fifteenth century.

Alonso de Fuentes, writing three hundred years after Alfonso's death, names him as author of a celebrated romance—"I left behind my native land"; the rhythm and accentuation prove the lines to belong to a fifteenth-century maker whose attribution of them to the King is palpably dramatic. Great authorities accept as authentic the Libro de Querellas (Book of Plaints), which is represented by two fine stanzas addressed to Diego Sarmiento, "brother and friend and vassal leal" of "him whose foot was kissed by kings, him from whom queens sought alms and grace." One is sorry to lose them, but they must be rejected. No such book is known to any contemporary; the twelve-syllabled octave in which the stanzas are written was not invented till a hundred years later; and these two stanzas are simply fabrications by Pellicer, who first published them in the seventeenth century in his Memoir on the House of Sarmiento, with a view to flattering his patron.

This to some extent clears the ground: but not altogether. Setting aside minor legal and philosophic treatises which Alfonso may have supervised, it remains to speak of more important matters. A great achievement is the code called, from the number of its divisions, the Siete Partidas (Seven Parts). This name does not appear to have been attached to the code till a hundred years after its compilation; but it may be worth observing that the notion is implied in the name of the Septenario, and that Alfonso, regarding the number seven as something of mysterious potency, exhausts himself in citing precedents—the seven days of the week, seven metals, seven arts, seven years that Jacob served, seven lean years in Egypt, the seven-branched candlestick, seven sacraments, and so on. The trait is characteristic of the time. It would be a grave mistake to suppose that the Siete Partidas in any way resembles a modern book of statutes, couched in the technical jargon of the law. Its primary object was the unification of the various clashing systems of law which Alfonso encountered within his unsettled kingdom; and this he accomplished with such success that all subsequent Spanish legislation derives from the Siete Partidas, which are still to some extent in force in the republican states of Florida and Louisiana. But the design soon outgrows mere practical purpose, and expands into dissertations upon general principles and the pettier details of conduct.

Sancho Panza, as Governor of Barataria, could not have bettered the counsels of the Siete Partidas, whose very titles force a smile: "What things men should blush to confess, and what not," "Why no monk should study law or physics," "Why the King should abstain from low talk," "Why the King should eat and drink moderately," "Why the King's children should be taught to be cleanly," "How to draw a will so that the witnesses shall not know its tenor," with other less prudish discussions. The reading of this code is not merely instructive and curious; apart from its dry humouristic savour, the Siete Partidas rises to a noble eloquence when the subject is the common weal, the office of the ruler, his relations to his people, and the interdependence of Church and State. No man, by his single effort, could draw a code of such intricacy and breadth, and it is established that Jacobo Ruiz and Fernán Martínez laboured on it; but Alfonso's is the supreme intelligence which appoints and governs, and his is the revising hand which leaves the text in its perfect verbal form.

In history, too, Alfonso sought distinction; and he found it. The Crónica or Estoria de Espanna, composed between the years 1260 and 1268, the General e grand Estoria, begun in 1270, owe to him their inspiration. The latter, ranging from the Creation to Apostolic times, glances at such secular events as the Babylonian Empire and the fall of Troy; the former extends from the peopling of Europe by the sons of Japhet to the death of St. Ferdinand. Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and Lucas de Tuy are the direct authorities, and their testimonies are completed by elaborate references that stretch from Pliny to the cantares de gesta. Moreover, the Arab chronicles are avowedly utilised in the account of the Cid's exploits: "thus says Abenfarax in his Arabic whence this history is derived." A singular circumstance is the inferiority of style in these renderings from the Arabic. Elsewhere a strange ignorance of Arabs and their history is shown by the compiler's inclusion of such fables as Muhammad's crusade in Córdoba. The inevitable conclusion is that the Estorias, like the Siete Partidas, are compilations by several hands; and the idea is supported by the fact that the prologue to the Estoria de Espanna is scarcely more than a translation of Jiménez de Rada's preface.

Late traditions give the names of Alfonso's collaborators in one or the other History as Egidio de Zamora, Jofre de Loaysa, Martín de Córdoba, Suero Pérez, Bishop of Zamora, and Garci Fernández de Toledo; and even though these attributions be (as seems likely) a trifle fantastical, they at least indicate a long-standing disbelief in the unity of authorship. It is proved that Alfonso gathered from Córdoba, Seville, Toledo, and Paris some fifty experts to translate Ptolemy's Quadri partitum and other astronomic treatises; it is natural that he should organise a similar committee to put together the first history in the Castilian language. Better than most of his contemporaries, he knew the value of combination. As with astronomy so with history: in both cases he conceived the scheme, in both cases he presided at the redaction and stamped the crude stuff with his distinctive seal. Judged by a modern standard, both Estorias lend themselves to a cheap ridicule; compared with their predecessors, they imply a finer appreciation of the value of testimony, and this notable evolution of the critical sense is matched by a manner that rises to the theme. Side by side with a greater care for chronology, there is a keener edge of patriotism which leads the compilers to embody in their text whole passages of lost cantares de gesta. And these are no purple patches: the expression is throughout dignified without pomp, and easy without familiarity. Spanish prose sheds much of its uncouthness, and takes its definitive form in such a passage as that upon the Joys of Spain: "More than all, Spain is subtle—ay! and terrible, right skilled in conflict, mirthful in labour, stanch to her lord, in letters studious, in speech courtly, fulfilled of gifts; never a land the earth overlong to match her excellence, to rival her bravery; few in the world as mighty as she." It may be lawful to believe that here we catch the personal accent of the King.

Compilations abound in which Alfonso is said to have shared, but they are of less importance than his Cantigas de Santa María (Canticles of the Virgin)—four hundred and twenty pieces, written and set to music in the Virgin's praise. Strictly speaking, these do not belong to Castilian literature, being written in the elaborate Galician language, which now survives as little better than a dialect. But they must be considered if we are to form any just idea of Alfonso's accomplishments and versatility. At the outset a natural question suggests itself: "Why should the King of Castile, after drawing up his code in Castilian, write his verses in Galician?" The answer is simple: "For the reason that he was an artist." Velázquez, indeed, asserts that Alfonso was reared in Galicia; but this is assertion, not evidence. The real motive of the choice was the superior development of the Galician, which so far outpassed the Castilian in flexibility and grace as to invite comparison with the Provençal. Troubadours in full flight from the Albigensian wars found grace at Alfonso's court; Aimeric de Belenoi, Nat de Mons, Calvo, Riquier, Lunel, and more.

That Alfonso wrote in Provençal seems probable enough, especially as he derides the incapacity in this respect of his father's trovador, Pero da Ponte; still, the two Provençal pieces which bear his name are spurious, and are the work of Nat de Mons and Riquier. Howbeit, the Provençal spell mastered him, and drove him to reproduce its elaborate rhythms. The first impression given by the Cantigas is one of unusual metrical resource. Verses of four syllables, of five, octosyllabics, hendecasyllabics, are among the singer's experiments. From the popular coplas, not unlike the modern seguidillas, he strays to the lumbering line of seventeen syllables; in five strophes he commits an acrostic as the name María; and half a thousand years before Matilda's lover went to Göttingen, he anticipates Canning's freak in the Anti-Jacobin by splitting up a word to achieve a difficult rhyme; he abuses the refrain by insistent repetition, so as to give the echo of a litany, or fit the ready-made melody of a juglar (clxxii.);—puerilities perhaps, but characteristic of a school and an epoch. Subjects are taken as they come, preference being given to the more universal version, and local legends taking a secondary place. A living English poet has merited great praise for his Ballad of a Nun. Six hundred years before Mr. Davidson, Alfonso gave six splendid variants of the famous story. Two men of genius have treated the legend of the statue and the ring—Prosper Mérimée in his Vénus d'Ille, and Heine in Les Dieux en Exile—with splendid effect. Alfonso (xlii.) anticipated them by rendering the story in verses of incomparable beauty, pregnant with mystery and terror.

For his part, Alfonso rifles Vincent de Beauvais, Gautier de Coinci, Berceo, and, in his encyclopædic way, borrows a hint from the old Catalan Planctus Mariæ Virginis; but his touch transmutes bold hagiology to measures of harmony and distinction. He was not—it cannot be claimed for him—a poet of supreme excellence; yet, if he fail to reach the topmost peaks, he vindicates his choice of a medium by outstripping his predecessors, and by pointing the path to those who succeed him. With the brain of a giant he combined the heart of a little child, and, technique apart, this amalgam which wrought his political ruin was his poetic salvation. Still an artist, even when he stumbles into the ditch, his metrical dexterity persists in such brutally erotic and satiric verse as he contributes to the Vatican Cancioneiro (Nos. 61–79). Withal, he survives by something better than mere virtuosity; for his simplicity and sincere enthusiasm, sundered from the prevalent affectation of his contemporaries, ensure him a place apart.

His example in so many fields of intellectual exercise was followed. What part he took (if any) in preparing Kalilah and Dimnah is not settled. The Spanish version, probably made before Alfonso's accession to the throne, derives straight from the Arabic, which, in its turn, is rendered by Abd Allah ibn al-Mukaffa (754–775) from Barzoyeh's lost Pehlevī (Old Persian) translations of the original Sanskrit. This last has disappeared, though its substance survives in the remodelled Panchatantra, and from it descend the variants that are found in almost all European literatures. The period of the Spanish rendering is hard to determine exactly, but 1251 is the generally accepted date, and its vogue is proved by the use made of it by Raimond de Béziers in his Latin version (1313). It does not appear to have been used by Raimond Lull (1229–1315), the celebrated Doctor illuminatus, in his Catalan Beast-Romance, inserted in the Libre de Maravelles about the year 1286. The value of the Spanish lies in the excellence of the narrative manner, and in its reduction of the oriental apologue to terms of the vernacular. Alfonso's brother, Fadrique, followed the lead in his Engannos é Assayamientos de las Mogieres (Crafts and Wiles of Women), which is referred to 1253, and is translated from the Arabic version of a lost Sanskrit original, after the fashion of Kalilah and Dimnah.

Translation is continued at the court of Alfonso's son and successor, Sancho IV. (d. 1295), who, as already noted, commands a version of Brunetto Latini's Tesoro; and the encyclopædic mania takes shape in a work entitled the Luçidario, a series of one hundred and six chapters, which begins by discussing "What was the first thing in heaven and earth?" and ends with reflections on the habits of animals and the whiteness of negroes' teeth. The Gran Conquista de Ultramar (Great Conquest Oversea) is a perversion of the history originally given by Guillaume de Tyr (d. 1184), mixed with other fabulous elements, derived perhaps from the French, and certainly from the Provençal, which thus comes for the first time in direct contact with Castilian prose. The fragmentary Provençal Chanson d'Antioche which remains can scarcely be the original form in which it was composed by its alleged author, Grégoire de Bechada: at best it is a rifacimento of a previous draught. But that it was used by the Spanish translator has been amply demonstrated by M. Gaston Paris. The translator has been identified with King Sancho himself; the safer opinion is that the work was undertaken by his order during his last days, and was finished after his death.

With these should be classed compilations like the Book of Good Proverbs, translated from Hunain ibn Ishāk al-'Ibādī; the Bonium or Bocados de Oro, from the collections of Abu 'l Wafā Mubashshir ibn Fātik, part of which was Englished by Lord Rivers, and thence conveyed into Caxton's Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers; and the Flowers of Philosophy, a treatise composed of thirty-eight chapters of fictitious moral sentences uttered by a tribe of thinkers, culminating—fitly enough for a Spanish book—in Seneca of Córdoba. In dealing with these works it is impossible to speak precisely as to source and date: the probability is that they were put together during the reign of Sancho, who was his father's son in more than the literal sense. Like Alfonso's, his ambition was to force his people into the intellectual current of the age, and in default of native masterpieces he supplied them with foreign models whence the desired masterpieces might proceed; and, like his father, Sancho himself entered the lists with his Castigos y Documentos (Admonitions and Exhortations), ninety chapters designed for the guidance of his son. This production, disfigured by the ostentatious erudition of the Middle Ages, is saved from death by its shrewd common-sense, by its practical counsel, and by the admirable purity and lucidity of style that formed the most valuable asset in Sancho's heritage. With him the literature of the thirteenth century comes to a dramatic close: the turbulent fighter, whose rebellion cut short his father's days, becomes the conscientious promoter of his father's literary tradition.

Footnote:

[3] So called because it embraced the seven subjects of learning: the trivio (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), and the quadrivio (music, astrology, physics, and metaphysics).