The Study of Spanish and Portuguese Literature. Friedrich Bouterwek

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СКАЧАТЬ most distinguished men of his age.35 He was descended, in a collateral line with the reigning family of Castile, from king Ferdinand III. usually called the Saint. He served his sovereign Alphonso XI. with chivalrous fidelity, and by the judicious policy of his conduct, retained the favour of that prince, who certainly had reason to regard him with jealousy. After distinguishing himself by a number of honourable and gallant deeds, Alphonso appointed him governor (adelantado mayor) of the country bordering on the Moorish kingdom of Grenada. In this station he became the terror of the hereditary enemy of Castile. He made an irruption into Grenada, and defeated the Moorish king in a great battle. After this brilliant victory, he always acted one of the first parts in the internal troubles of Castile, and during twenty years conducted the war against the Moors. He died in 1362, leaving behind him some of the ripest fruits of his experience in his Count Lucanor. A Spanish book, so full of sound practical good sense, of a character so truly unostentatious, and clothed in a simple, homely, but far from inanimate garb, could scarcely be expected to belong to the fourteenth century. In estimating the merit of this work, it ought also to be recollected, that at the period in which it appeared, the taste for the wild tales of chivalry called romances had begun to prevail. Amadis de Gaul, the prototype of all subsequent knight-errantry romances, had then obtained general circulation. There is, however, in the Count Lucanor, no trace of romantic extravagance, none of the dreaming flights of an irregular imagination; for in every passage of the book the author shews himself a man of the world and an observer of human nature. In the course of his long experience he had formed maxims for the conduct of life which he was desirous of pursuing. He gave to many of these axioms a laconic expression in verse; and, to impress them the more forcibly, invented his Count Lucanor, a prince conscious of too limited an understanding to trust to his own judgment in cases of difficulty. He gives the Count a minister (consejero), whose wisdom fortunately supplies the deficiency of his master’s intellect. When the Count asks advice of his minister, the latter relates a story, or sometimes a fable. The application comes at the close, and the narrative is the commentary of the verse or couplet with which it terminates. In this manner forty-nine moral and political tales are told. They are not of equal merit; but though some are inferior to others, the difference is not great, and they have all the same rhetorical form. Sometimes it is the idea that gives the chief interest, sometimes the execution. Among the versified maxims are the following.

      “If you have done something good in little, do it also in great, as the good will never die.”36

      “He who advises you to be reserved to your friends, wishes to betray you without witnesses.”37

      “Hazard not your wealth on a poor man’s advice.”38

      “He who has got a good seat should not leave it.”39

      “He who praises you for what you have not, wishes to take from you what you have.”40

      This last axiom is deduced from the well-known fable of the fox and the raven. It is curious to observe the resemblance between the unconscious artless simplicity with which Don Juan Manuel relates his fable, and the finely-studied simplicity with which the elegant La Fontaine tells the same story. Who would expect to find in an old Spanish book of the fourteenth century, the same knowledge of the world and mankind, as distinguished the refined age of Louis XIV.41

      This work appears to have been preserved without alteration, as it was originally written. It is only occasionally that the difference of the language in single words,42 betrays the officious industry of some transcriber. In a short preface, the author gives a candid explanation of the object of this collection of tales.

      Don Juan Manuel was also the author of a Chronicle (Chronica de España); the Book of the Sages, (Libro de los Sabios); a Book of Chivalry, (Libro del Caballero); and several other works in prose of a similar nature.43 It appears that these works are now lost, though they were preserved in manuscript in the sixteenth century. A collection of Don Juan Manuel’s poems also existed at that time, according to the express testimony of Argote y Molina, who published El Conde Lucanor in the sixteenth century, and intended to publish those poems likewise. He calls them coplas; and they certainly were not alexandrines. After this testimony, it can scarcely be doubted that some of the romances and songs, which are attributed, in the Cancionero general, to a Don Juan Manuel, have this prince for their author.44 But if such be the fact, then how many of the similar romances which are still preserved, may, considering the greater antiquity of their form, be yet more ancient!

SATIRICAL POEM OF JUAN RUYZ, ARCH-PRIEST OF HITA.

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      Don Juan Manuel had for his contemporary the author of an allegorical satire, written in Castilian alexandrines, or in a kind of verse which may be called doggrel. The result of the researches of the Spanish critics ascribes this very singular work to Juan Ruiz, arch-priest of Hita, in Castile.45 This writer evidently possessed a lively imagination; he has personified with great drollery Lent, the Carnival, and Breakfast, under the titles of Doña Quaresma, Don Carnal, and Don Almuerzo; and these and other personages are placed in a very edifying connection with Don Amor. The object of the satire is thus apparent, but the execution is as unskilful as the language is rude. Only a part of the work has been preserved.46

      He, however, who has to record the developement of true poetic genius, must hasten from this and other examples of monastic humour and rugged versification, in order to speak with something like historical precision of the romances and other lyric compositions which form the real commencement of Spanish poetry.

MORE PRECISE ACCOUNT OF THE ORIGIN OF THE SPANISH POETIC ROMANCES AND SONGS—PROBABLE RISE OF THE ROMANCES OF CHIVALRY IN PROSE—ORIGINAL RELATIONSHIP OF THE POETIC AND THE PROSE ROMANCES.

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      The latter half of the fourteenth century is the period when the history of the Spanish romances and songs, the unknown authors of which yet live in their verse, though still very defective, begins to acquire some degree of certainty.47 In the absence, however, of that particular information which would be desirable, it becomes necessary to take a view of the manner of thinking of the Spaniards of that age, in order to connect the general idea which ought to be formed of their literary culture, with those scattered notices which must supply the place of a more systematic account. It will here be recollected that the cultivation of Spanish literature received at its commencement a national poetic impulse. In constant conflict with the Moors, and acquainted with oriental manners and compositions, the Spaniards felt the proper distinction between poetry and prose, less readily than that distinction was perceived by any other people on the first attempt to give a determinate form to their literature. Popular songs of every kind were probably indigenous in the Peninsula. The patriotic Spaniards, like many other ancient nations, were fond of preserving the memory of remarkable events in ballads. They also began, at a very early period, to consider it of importance to record public transactions in prose. The example of their learned king Alphonso X. who caused a collection of old national chronicles to be made, gave birth to many similar compilations of the history of the country. But historical criticism, and the historical art, were then equally unknown. As the giving to an accredited fact a poetical dress in a song fit to be sung to a guitar, was not thought inconsistent with the spirit of genuine national history, still less could the relating of a fabricated story as a real event in history seem hostile to the spirit of poetry. Thus the historical romance in verse, and the chivalric romance in prose, derived their origin from the confounding of the limits of epic and historical composition. The history of Spanish poetical romance is therefore intimately interwoven with the history of the prose chivalric romance.

      Whoever СКАЧАТЬ