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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, or the whole desert of sensation-fodder which pours from the all too rapid machines of the Fiction Trusts.

Still another extravagant and more unpleasant manifestation of the popular craze for romance arose in such religious tales as The Celestial Chivalry, The Knight of the Bright Star, and others of little worth, in which Biblical characters are endowed with the attributes of chivalry and go on adventure bound. The time occupied by the appearance of these varying types, and indeed in the whole latter-day evolution of Spanish romance, was strikingly brief. But half a century elapsed between the publication of Amadis and the most extreme of its worthless imitations. But it is not difficult to account for the rapid manufacture and dissemination of such a mass of literature, good and bad, when we recall that Spain had been for ages the land of active knighthood, that her imagination had been wrought to a high pitch of fervour in her long struggle with her pagan enemies, and that in the tales of chivalry she now gazed upon with such admiration she saw the reflection of her own courtly and heroic spirit—the most sensitive and most fantastically chivalrous in Europe.