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Of Moorish grandeur of thought and luxuriance of emotion we find little in Spanish literature, at least until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Its note is distinctively, nay almost aggressively, European, as will be readily understood from the circumstances of its origin.23 But it would seem that with the Castilian occupation of the Moorish parts of Spain the atmosphere which the Saracen had left behind him powerfully affected the Spaniard, who appears to have cast a halo of romance round the character of his ancient foe, with whose civilization, as expressed in its outward manifestations of architecture and artifact, he could scarcely have failed to be deeply impressed. If our conclusions are well founded it would appear that about the era alluded to a Moorish ’fashion’ set in in Spanish literature, just as did an Oriental craze in the England of Byron and Moore, when English people began to travel in the Levantine countries. But this fashion was in great measure pseudo-Saracenic, unaffected by literary models and derived indirectly more from atmosphere and art than directly from men or books. Long before the fifteenth century, however, with its rather artificial mania for everything Moresque, the Arab spirit had been at work upon Spanish literature, although in a feeble and unconscious manner. Spanish literary forms, whether in verse or prose, owe absolutely nothing to it, and especially is this the case in regard to the assonance which characterizes Castilian poetry, a prosodic device found in the verse of all Romance tongues at an early period. The Moors, however, seem to have sophisticated, if they did not write, the ballads of the Hispano-Moorish frontiers, especially those which have reference to the loss of Alhamia. In any case these are founded upon Moorish legends. Certain metrical pedants, like the Marquis de Santillana, toyed with Arabic verse-forms as Swinburne did with the French rondeau or Dobson with the ballade, or as the dry-as-dusts of our universities with Greek hexameters, neglecting for the alien and recondite the infinite possibilities of their mother-tongue. These preciosities, to which many men of letters in all ages have been addicted, had no more effect upon the main stream of Castilian literature than such attempts ever have upon the literary output of a country. Some of the popular coplas, or couplets, however, seem to be direct translations from the Arabic, which is not surprising when we remember the considerable number of half-breeds to be found in the Peninsula until the middle of the seventeenth century. There can be no doubt, too, that Arabic was the spoken language of thousands of Christians in Southern Spain. But that it had a determined opponent in the native Spanish is becoming more and more clear—an opponent which it found as merciless as the Moor found the Spaniard.24

Perhaps the best measure of the decline of Arabic as a spoken language in Spain is the fact that the authors of many romances declare them to be mere translations from the Arabic—usually the writings of Moorish magicians or astrologers. These pretensions are easily refuted by means of internal evidence. But regarding the question broadly and sanely, Spanish literature could no more remain unaffected by Arab influence than could Spanish music, architecture, or handicrafts. All such influences, however, were undoubtedly late, and, as regards the romances, were much more ‘spiritual’ than ‘material.’ Christian Spain had held off the Saracen for eight hundred years, and when at last she consented to drink out of the Saracen cup she filled it with her own wine. But the strange liquor which had brimmed it before left behind it the mysterious odours and scents of the Orient, faint, yet unmistakable.