Legends & Romances of Spain Part 16

"It may not be," replied the stern old King. "She dies, I say, and that to-night. When the escutcheon of a king is stained, it matters not whether the blood that washes the blot away be guilty or innocent. Away, and do my behest, or your life shall pay the forfeit."

Terrified at the thought of a traitor's death, for such an end was more dreaded than any other by the haughty Castilian n.o.bles, Alarcos agreed to abide by the King's decision, and rode homeward in an agony of remorse and despair. The thought that he must be the executioner of the wife whom he dearly loved, the mother of his three beautiful children, drove him to madness, and when at last he met her at the gate of his castle, accompanied by her infants, and displaying every sign of joy at his return, he shrank from her caresses, and could only mutter that he had bad news, which he would divulge to her in her bower.

Taking her youngest babe, she led him to her apartment, where supper was laid. But the Count Alarcos neither ate nor drank, but laid his head upon the board and wept bitterly out of a breaking heart. Then, recalling his dreadful purpose, he barred the doors, and, standing with folded arms before his lady, confessed his sin.

"Long since I loved a lady," he said. "I plighted my troth to her, and vowed to love her like a husband. Her father is the King. She claims me for her own, and he demands that I make good the promise. Furthermore, alas that I should say it! the King has spoken your death, and has decreed that you die this very night."

"What!" cried the Countess, amazed. "Are these then the wages of my loyal love for you, Alarcos? Wherefore must I die? Oh, send me back to my father's house, where I can live in peace and forgetfulness, and rear my children as those of thy blood should be reared."

"It may not be," answered the wretched Count. "I have pledged mine oath."

"Friendless am I in the land," cried the miserable lady. "But at least let me kiss my children ere I die."

"Thou mayst kiss the babe upon thy breast," groaned Alarcos. "The others thou mayst not see again. Prepare thee."

The doomed Countess kissed her babe, muttered an Ave, and, rising from her knees, begged her merciless lord to be kind to their children. She pardoned her husband, but laid upon the King and his daughter the awful curse known to the people of the Middle Ages as "the a.s.size of the Dying," so often taken advantage of by those who were falsely accused and condemned to die, and by virtue of which the victim summoned his murderers to meet him before the throne of G.o.d ere thirty days were past and answer for their crime to their Creator.

The Count strangled his wife with a silken kerchief, and when the horrid deed had been done, and she lay cold and dead, he summoned his esquires, and gave himself up to a pa.s.sion of woe.

Within twelve days the revengeful Infanta perished in agony. The merciless King died on the twentieth day, and ere the moon had completed her round Alarcos too drooped and died. Cruel and inevitable as Greek tragedy is the tale of Alarcos. But while perusing it and under the spell of its tragic pathos we can scarcely regard it as of the nature of legend, and we know not whom to abhor the most--the revengeful Princess, the cruel King, or the coward husband who sacrificed his innocent and devoted wife to the shadow of that aristocratic 'honour' which has to its discredit almost as great a holocaust of victims as either superst.i.tion or fanaticism.

CHAPTER IX: THE ROMANCEROS OR BALLADS

Iliads without a Homer.

Lope de Vega

The word romancero in modern Spanish is more or less strictly applied to a special form of verse composition, a narrative poem written in lines of sixteen syllables which adhere to one single a.s.sonance throughout. Originally the term was applied to those dialects or languages which were the offspring of the Roman or Latin tongue--the spoken language of old Rome in its modernized forms. Later it came to imply only the written forms of those vernaculars, and lastly the poetic lyrico-narrative form alone, as above indicated. The romancero therefore differs from the romance in that it is written in verse, and it is plain from what has just been said that the name 'romance' was the product of the transition period when the term was intended to describe the written output of the more modern forms of Latin-Castilian, Portuguese, French, and Provencal, whether couched in prose or verse. We have seen that practically all the romances proper, as apart from the cantares de gesta--that is, such compositions as Amadis, Palmerin, and Partenopex--were written in prose. But the romancero was first and last a narrative in verse. Indeed, the three tales recounted in the last chapter are of the romancero type--a form, as we shall see, which gained quite as strong a hold upon the lower cla.s.ses of the Peninsula as the romance proper did upon the affections of the hidalgo and the caballero. In a word, the romancero is the popular ballad of Spain.

In a previous chapter I attempted to outline the several types of the Spanish ballad, or romancero, as follows:

(1) Those of spontaneous popular origin and early date.

(2) Those based upon pa.s.sages in the chronicles or cantares de gesta.

(3) Folk-ballads of a relatively late date.

(4) Those later ballads which were the production of conscious art.

We can thus cla.s.s Spanish ballads more broadly into:

(1) Those of popular origin.

(2) Those which have their rise in literary sources.

As regard cla.s.s (1) of the first quaternion, like Sancho Panza I have no intention of indicating how old these may be. The fiercest controversy has raged round this question, but, as I have already indicated, it would be strange indeed if no vestiges of early Castilian folk-song had come down to us in an altered form. Folk-song, in my view, has as great a chance of survival as custom or legend, and we know how persistent these are in undisturbed areas, so I see no reason to doubt that a certain number of the original ballads of Spain have come down to us in such an altered form as would, perhaps, render them unrecognizable to their makers, just as the ancient Scottish romance of Thomas the Rhymer would not have been recognized in its later form by the singer who composed it.

All the arguments, archaeological and philological, erected and advanced by mere erudition will not convince me to the contrary. To some people antiquity is a living thing, a warm and glowing environment, a world with the paths and manners of which they are better acquainted than with the streets of every day. To others it is--a museum. I have no quarrel with the curators of that museum, and I enjoy reading their books--records of a land which few of them have visited. But when they insist upon controverting the evidence supplied by senses which they do not possess they become merely tiresome. Like art, archaeology has also its inspirations, its higher vision. Alas that those who do not share it should attempt to justify their conclusions by lifeless logic alone!

Therefore I shall say no more concerning the age of the ballads of Old Spain, but will only remark with Sancho that "they are too old to lie." I have clearly shown, too, that a number of them were based on pa.s.sages in the chronicles and cantares, a circ.u.mstance which in itself vouches for their relative antiquity. With the later artificial imitations of Gongora and Lope de Vega, and others of similar stamp, we are not concerned here. After all, we can only take the ballads of Spain as we find them in the cancioneros. It is much too late in the day now to do anything else. Like the ballads of Scotland and Denmark, those of Spain have been collected and published for centuries, and in the pages of the cancioneros old and new, popular and literary, are mingled together in almost inextricable confusion. Let us glance, then, at the history of these cancioneros, these treasure-houses of a people's poetry, and attempt to realize their plan and scope as perhaps the best method by which to approach the subject of the Spanish ballad generally. Having done this, we can then discuss matters of origin with critics of insight and sympathy.

The "Cancionero General"

If we except the fragmentary collection of Juan Fernandez de Constantina, the Cancionero General, or "Universal Song-book," as it might be translated, was originally brought together and published at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a certain Fernando del Castillo. The arrangement of the ballads it contains is neither chronological nor thoroughly systematic, although the productions of each author are kept distinct. Later editions of this work quickly multiplied, and as the collection extended the additions were always inserted at the end of the book. The collection consists for the most part of the ballads of authors of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, such as Tallante, Nicolas Nunez, Juan de Mena, Porticarrero, and the still earlier Marquis de Santillana.

The first portion of the work is confined to the spiritual songs (obras de devocion). These are monotonous and informed with a rigid fanaticism. Nor are the "Moral Poems" which follow any more attractive, allegorizing virtues and vices according to the definitions of scholastic philosophy. The amatory verses in the collection are more ingenious than truly poetic; they lack true feeling, and appear stiff and artificial in their reiteration of burning pa.s.sion and the overwhelming woes of unrequited love, mingled with pseudo-philosophical appeals to reason. But gay and graceful love songs are not lacking, as, for example, the "Muy mas clara que de luna" of Juan de Meux or the "Pensamienti, pues mostrays" of Diego Lopez de Haro. But these trail off into philosophical disquisition, and the tender sentiment in which they were conceived and commenced is lost in the shallows of paltry argument.

Much more promising are the canciones, or lyrical poems of a semi-conventional cast, which have a character and metrical form all their own. They usually consist of twelve lines, divided into two parts. The first four lines comprehend the idea on which the song is founded, and this is developed or applied in the eight succeeding lines. The Cancionero General contains one hundred and fifty-six of these little songs, some of which are the best poems contained in it, and perhaps they owe their excellence to the verbal restraint which their form compels. An allied form is the villancico, or conceit, usually of three or four lines, a fugitive piece, enshrining some fleeting emotion, and often packed with the matter of poesy.

The "Romancero General"

The t.i.tle Romancero General was applied to many collections of Spanish songs and narrative romances in verse published during the seventeenth century and later. Of these only the older require ill.u.s.tration here. The first in point of date was the collection of Miguel de Madrigal, published in 1604, although another work containing upward of a thousand romances and songs was produced in the same year, and bears the same t.i.tle. Another collection of primary importance is that of Pedro de Flores (1614). This is obviously a bookseller's compilation, but is none the worse for that, save that it pretends to embrace the entire sum of Spanish romanceros, whereas it contains not one of those appearing in the Cancionero General. All of these works contain numerous amatory poems of the kind so liberally exemplified in the Cancionero General, but with these we have little concern, and our attention may be better employed in examining the romanceros proper which it contains. These for the most part would seem to belong to the fifteenth century, and relate to the civil wars of Granada, the last Moorish princ.i.p.ality in Spain, and the heroic and gallant adventures of Moorish knights. It is, indeed, in this work that we first perceive the trend toward a literary fas.h.i.+on in things Moorish to which we have referred in a previous chapter, but, as has been indicated, this is very far from saying that these poems owe their origin to Moorish models. But there are not wanting Castilian themes and stories, such as those relating to Roderic, Bernaldo de Carpio, Fernan Gonzalez, the Infantes of Lara, and the Cid. Most of these were written by men of humble station, the true poets of the people, the late representatives of those juglares who had sung or recited the cantares de gesta. [51]

Mr James Fitzmaurice Kelly is at once the best informed and most sympathetic of modern critics on the subject of the romancero. In his admirable Chapters on Spanish Literature, a delightful series of excursions into several of the most interesting provinces of Spanish letters, he reviews the romancero in some forty vivid pages, remarkable alike for critical insight and the sanity of the conclusions to which they point. Taking Lockhart's Spanish Ballads as a basis for comment, he addresses himself to the racy criticism of the collection of the Scottish translator. A better plan for the initiation of the English-speaking reader into the mysteries of the romancero could scarcely be conceived, for there are few who possess no acquaintance with Lockhart's work, one of the most persistent of the drawing-room books of Victorian days. Following Mr Kelly's admirable lead, then, though not in the spirit of base imitation, let us take Lockhart as our 'doc.u.ment' and examine the more interesting of his translations, not only as regards their subject-matter, but their excellences and shortcomings, comparing them also with those of Bowring and others. Following Depping, Lockhart divides his volume of ballads into three sections: Historical, Moorish, and Romantic. With the first two groups of poems, or rather with their subject-matter--those relating to King Roderic and Bernaldo de Carpio--we have dealt elsewhere.

The Maiden Tribute

The next in order, "The Maiden Tribute," deals with a demand of the Moorish monarch Abderahman that a hundred Christian virgins should annually be delivered into his hands. King Ramiro refused to comply with such a shameful custom, and marched to meet the Moor. A two days'

battle was fought near Alveida, and at the conclusion of the first day's hostilities the superior discipline of the Saracens had told heavily against the Castilians. During the night, St Iago, the patron saint of Spain, appeared to the King in a vision and promised his aid in the field next day. With morning the battle was joined once more, the Saint, true to his word, led the Spanish charge, and the Saracens were cast into headlong rout. The maiden tribute was never afterward paid.

Lockhart's ballad, or rather translation, certainly does not enhance the original.

If the Moslem must have tribute, make men your tribute-money, Send idle drones to tease them within their hives of honey,

is the commonest of crambo, and

Must go, like all the others, the proud Moor's bed to sleep in-- In all the rest they're useless, and nowise worth the keeping,