The Study of Spanish and Portuguese Literature. Friedrich Bouterwek

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      INTRODUCTION.

       GENERAL VIEW OF THE ORIGIN OF ROMANTIC POETRY AND ELOQUENCE, IN THE KINGDOMS OF SPAIN AND PORTUGAL.

       Table of Contents

      When modern refinement began, during the thirteenth century, to emerge from the rudeness of the middle ages, that part of Europe which geographers have called the Pyrenean Peninsula, and which, according to its present political division, forms Spain and Portugal, contained four Christian kingdoms and some Mahometan principalities, to which the title of kingdom has also been given. More than five hundred years had elapsed since the battle of Xerez de la Frontera;4 and the Moors, who, by the result of that conflict, obtained the dominion of the greater part of Spain and Portugal, had, by the repeated victories of the Christians, been, in their turn, driven back to the southern extremity of the country, and were obviously not destined to maintain themselves much longer even in that quarter.

      During these five centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare between the race of Moorish Arabs and the Christians of ancient European descent, both parties, notwithstanding that their reciprocal hostility was influenced by fanaticism, had unconsciously approximated in mind and in manners. The intervals of repose, which formed short links in the chain of their sanguinary conflicts, afforded them some opportunities for the interchange of the arts of peace, and they were soon taught to feel for each other that involuntary respect which the brave can never withhold from brave adversaries. Love adventures, in which the Moorish knight and Christian lady, or the Christian knight and Moorish lady, respectively participated, could not be of rare occurrence. The Arab, who, in his native deserts, had not been accustomed to impose on women half the despotic restraints to which the sex is subject in the harems of Mahometan cities, was soon disposed to imitate the gallantry of the descendants of the Goths; and still more readily did the imagination of the Christian knight, in a climate which was far from being ungenial, even to African invaders, acquire an oriental loftiness. Thus arose the spirit of Spanish knighthood, which was, in reality, only a particular form of the general chivalrous spirit then prevailing in most of the countries of Europe, but which, under that form, impressed in an equal degree, on the old European Spaniard an oriental, and on the Spanish Moor a European character.

      In the first period of this long contest the Arabs carried learning and the arts to a degree of cultivation far beyond any thing known in the Christian parts of Spain. Those wild enthusiasts learned, on the European soil, to estimate the value of civilized life with a rapidity as astonishing as that which distinguished the social improvement of their brethren, whom they had left behind in Asia, under the government of the Caliphs. Before the era of Mahomet, their language had been cultivated and adapted to poetry and eloquence, according to the laws of oriental taste. In Spain, it soon acquired, even among the conquered Christians, the superiority over the barbarous Romance, or dialect of the country, which was then governed by no rule: for in the eighth century, when the Moors penetrated into Spain, the Visigoths, who had been masters of the territory since the fifth century, were not yet completely intermixed by matrimonial alliances with the Provincials, or descendants of the Roman subjects; and the new national language, which had grown out of a corrupt latin, was still the sport of accident. The conquered Christians, in the provinces under Moorish dominion, soon forgot their Romance. They became, indeed, so habituated to the Arabic, that, according to the testimony of a bishop of Cordova, who lived in the ninth century, out of a thousand Spanish Christians, scarcely one was to be found capable of repeating the latin forms of prayer, while many could express themselves in Arabic with rhetorical elegance, and compose Arabic verses.5

      But the Christians who had preserved their independence, descending from the mountains of the Asturias, began to repel the invaders, and in proportion as they extended their conquests, a wider field was opened for the Spanish tongue. It remained, nevertheless, long barren and rude, and was destined to receive many additions from the rich and elegant Arabic, before it attained the copiousness requisite for the wants even of common life.

      The circumstances, however, under which the dialects of the several provinces existed, did not present those facilities for an improved national language, on the principle of the Italian Volgare illustre, of the age of Dante, which would have enabled a poet of Dante’s genius, had such then arisen in Spain, to form out of them one general literary language for all the Christian states of the Peninsula. It happened, singularly enough, that about the beginning of the thirteenth century, the three principal idioms which were spoken from the coast of the Atlantic to the Pyrenees, and from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, were represented by three kingdoms perfectly independent of each other. The Castilian prevailed exclusively only in the Castiles and Leon, the latter of which was permanently united to the former in the year 1230. The Portuguese was spoken both by the court and the people of Portugal. In the kingdom of Arragon, the language in general use was the Catalonian, a dialect nearly the same as the Provençal or Limosin of the south of France, but differing greatly both from the Castilian and the Portuguese. This language also extended to the little kingdom of Navarre, but it was there spoken only by the nobles, who were of French or Hispano-Gothic origin. The great body of the population in Navarre spoke the ancient Cantabrian, called Baskian, Vaskian, or Biscayan, and which still exists in the Pyrenees and in the Spanish province of Biscay.

      The trouble will be repaid if a glance be now cast on the map, in order to distinguish, with somewhat more precision than is usually thought necessary, the respective domains of the three principal dialects of the Spanish tongue; for it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to form any opinion on the contest maintained between the Spaniards and the Portuguese relative to the value of their respective languages, and the influence which the merits or demerits of these languages have had on the polite literature of both countries, without a knowledge of the geographical boundaries, which, previously to the political divisions, separated the Portuguese from the Castilians, and the latter from the Arragonese. In these questions the Biscayan language is of no consideration, as it has only an accidental and unimportant connexion with the other Spanish dialects, and, besides, bears not the most remote resemblance to them.6

      The mutilated latin spoken along the Mediterranean on the Spanish shore, from the Pyrenees as far as Murcia, appears to have resolved itself, before the period of the Arabian invasion, into the same language which extended eastward from the Pyrenees through the whole of the south of France to the Italian frontiers, and which, according to the most remarkable of its provincial forms, was called the Catalonian, the Valencian, the Limosin, and the Provençal. Of all the tongues spoken in modern Europe, this language of the coasts was the first cultivated. In it the Troubadours sang, and their lays had all the same character, whether addressed to the Italians, the French, or the Spaniards. From Catalonia it probably spread itself along the chain of the Pyrenees. The kingdom of Arragon became, after the restoration of the Spanish romance in that quarter, its second country; for there both it and the poetry of the Troubadours were particularly favoured by the princes and the nobles. But at the very period of the decline of this poetry, the kingdom СКАЧАТЬ