Читать книгу Legends & Romances of Spain - Lewis Spence - Страница 16

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The immortal ballads of Spain have been the subject of the sharpest controversy, and their importance as Romantic material demands special treatment in a separate chapter. Regarding the period to which they belong and their relations to the larger narrative poems and chronicles, we must deal briefly with them here. Some authorities ascribe them to an early age and insist upon their priority to such poems as the Poema del Cid and such chronicles as that of Alfonso the Learned, while others are equally assured of the late date of the greater number. It seems to me that the truth resides in both hypotheses, and that in this case, as frequently in literary navigation, it is wise to steer a middle course. In my view the ballads of Spain are of four fundamental types: those which arose spontaneously in Northern Spain at some time subsequent to the formation of the Castilian language, and which, if we possess any remnants of them at all, have probably come down to us in such a form as would render them unrecognizable to those who first sang them; ballads which 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.