Читать книгу Legends & Romances of Spain - Lewis Spence - Страница 23

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With the juglar, indeed, was left the final form of the cantar, for he would shape and shear it, add to or suppress, as his instinct told him the taste of his audience demanded. Not infrequently he would try to pour the wine of a cantar into the bottle of a popular air, and if it overflowed and was spilt, so much the worse for the cantar. Frequently he was accompanied not only by an instrumentalist, but by a remendador, or mimic, who illustrated his tale in dumb show. These sons of the gay science were notoriously careless of their means of livelihood, and lived a hand-to-mouth existence. A crust of bread and a cup of wine sufficed them when silver was scarce. Unsullied by the lust of hire, they journeyed from hall to hall, from castle to castle, unmindful of all but their mission—to soothe the asperities of a barbarous age.

Our long-dead brothers of the roundelay,

Whose meed was wine, who held that praise was pay,

Hearten ye by their lives, ye singers of to-day!

But this simple state did not last. As the taste for the cantares grew, the trovadores and their satellites, after the manner of mankind, became clamorous for the desirable things of life, making the age-long plea of the artist that the outward insignia of beauty are his very birthright, and forgetting how fatal it is to

Stain with wealth and power

The poet’s free and heavenly mind.

These “spirits from beyond the moon” did not, alas! “refuse the boon.” Kings, infantes, and peers indulged the trovador out of full purses, flattered him by imitating his art and his life, and even enrolled themselves in his brotherhood. Few men of genius are so constituted as to be able to control altogether a natural hauteur and superiority. In these early days poetical arrogance seems to have been as unchecked as military boastfulness, and the trovadores, pampered and fêted by prince and noble, at length grew insufferable in their insolence and rapacity. The land swarmed with singers, real and pretended, the manner of whose lives became a scandal, even in a day when scandal was cheap. The public grew weary of the repetition of the cantares and the harping on a single string. It became fashionable to read romances instead of listening to them, and eventually we see the juglares footing it on the highways of Spain, and declaiming at street-corners in a state of mendicancy more pitiable by far than their old indigent yet dignified conditions.

A “Trovador” of Old Spain

Few of the ancient cantares of Spain have survived, in contradistinction to the hundred or more chansons that France can show. But what remains of them suffices to distinguish their type with sufficient clearness. As has been indicated, we owe our knowledge of more than one of them to the circumstance that they became embedded in the ancient chronicles of Spain. An excellent illustration of this process of literary embalming is provided by the manner in which the cantar of Bernaldo de Carpio has become encrusted in the rather dreary mass of the General Chronicle of Spain which was compiled by King Alfonso the Wise (c. 1260), in which it will be found in the seventh and twelfth chapters of the third part. The poet-king states that he has founded his history of Bernaldo upon “old lays,” and in the spirit as well as the form of his account of the legendary champion we can trace the influence of the cantar.