In Spain, as in all countries where it is possible to observe the origin and the development of letters, the earliest literature bears the stamp of influences which are either epic or religious. These primitive pieces are characterised by a vein of popular, unconscious poetry, with scarce a touch of personal artistry; and the ascription which refers one or other of them to an individual writer is, for the most part, arbitrary. Insufficiency of data makes it impossible to identify the oldest literary performance in Spanish Romance. Jews like Judah ben Samuel the Levite, and trovadores like Rambaud de Vaqueiras, arabesque their verses with Spanish tags and refrains; but these are whimsies. Our choice lies rather between the Misterio de los Reyes Magos (Mystery of the Magian Kings) and the so-called Poema del Cid (Poem of the Cid). Experts differ concerning their respective dates; but the liturgical derivation of the Misterio inclines one to hold it for the elder of the two. If Lidforss were right in attributing it to the eleventh century, the play would rank among the first in any modern language. Amador de los RÍos dates it still further back. As these pretensions are excessive, the known facts may be briefly given. The Misterio follows upon a commentary on the Lamentations of Jeremiah, written by a canon of Auxerre, Gilibert l'Universel, who died in 1134; and its existence was first denoted at the end of the last century by Felipe FernÁndez Vallejo, Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela between 1798 and 1800, who correctly classified it as a dramatic scene to be given on the Feast of the Epiphany, and considered it a version from some Latin original. Both conjectures have proved just. Throughout Europe the Christian theatre derives from the Church, and the early plays are but a lay vernacular rendering of models studied in the sanctuary. Simplified as the liturgy now is, the Mass itself, the services of Palm Sunday and Good Friday, are the unmistakable dÉbris of an elaborate sacred drama.

The Spanish Misterio proceeds from one of the Latin offices used at Limoges, Rouen, Nevers, CompiÈgne, and Orleans, with the legend of the Magi for a motive; and these, in turn, are dramatic renderings of pious traditions, partly oral, and partly amplifications of the apocryphal Protevangelium Jacobi Minoris and the Historia de Nativitate MariÆ et de Infanti Salvatoris.[2] These Franco-Latin liturgical plays, here mentioned in the probable order of their composition during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, reached Spain through the Benedictines of Cluny; and as in each original redaction there is a distinct advance upon its immediate predecessor, so in the Spanish rendering these primitive exemplars are developed. In the Limoges version there is no action, the rudimentary dialogue consisting in the allotment of liturgical phrases among the personages; in the Rouen office, the number of actors is increased, and Herod, though he does not appear, is mentioned; a still later redaction brings the shepherds on the scene. The Spanish Misterio reaches us as a fragment of some hundred and fifty lines, ending at the moment when the rabbis consult their sacred books upon Herod's appeal to

Its provenance is proved by the inclusion of three Virgilian lines (Æneid, viii. 112-114), lifted by the arranger of the Orleans rite. The Magi are mentioned by name, and one speech is given by Gaspar: important points which help to fix the date of writing. A passage in Bede speaks of Melchior, senex et canus; of Baltasar, fuscus, integre barbatus; of Gaspar, juvenis imberbis; but this appears to be interpolated. The names likewise appear in the famous sixth-century mosaic of the Church of Sant' Apollinare della CittÀ at Ravenna; and here, again, the insertion is probably a pious afterthought. If Hartmann be justified in his contention, that the traditional names of the Magi were not in vogue till after the alleged discovery of their remains at Milan in 1158, the Spanish Misterio can be, at best, no older than the end of the twelfth century.

Enough of it remains to show that the Spanish workman improved upon his models. He elaborates the dramatic action, quickens the dialogue with newer life, and gives his scene an ampler, a more vivid atmosphere. Led by the heavenly star, the three Magi first appear separately, then together; they celebrate the birth of Christ, whom they seek to adore, at the end of their thirteen days' pilgrimage. Encountering Herod, they confide to him their mission; the King conjures his "abbots" (rabbis), counsellors, and soothsayers to search the mystic books, and to say whether the Magis' tale be true. The passages between Herod and his rabbis are marked by intensity and passion, far exceeding the Franco-Latin models in dramatic force; and there is a corresponding progress of mechanism, distribution, and rapidity.

There is even a breath of the critical spirit wholly absent from all other early mysteries, which accept the miraculous sign of the star with a simple, unquestioning faith. In our play, the first and third Magi wish to observe it another night, while the second King would fain watch it for three entire nights. Lastly, the scale of the Misterio is larger than that of any predecessor; the personages are not huddled upon the scene at once, but appear in appropriate, dramatic order, delivering more elaborate speeches, and expressing at greater length more individual emotions. This fragmentary piece, written in octosyllabics, forms the foundation-stone of the Spanish theatre; and from it are evolved, in due progression, "the light and odour of the flowery and starry Autos" which were to enrapture Shelley. Important and venerable as is the Misterio, its freer treatment of the liturgy, its effectual blending of realism with devotion, and its swiftness of action are so many arguments against its reputed antiquity. It is still old if we adopt the conclusion that it was written some twenty years before the Poema del Cid.

This misnamed epic, no unworthy fellow to the Chanson de Roland, is the first great monument of Spanish literature. Like the Misterio de los Reyes Magos, like so many early pieces, the Poema del Cid reaches us maimed and mutilated. The beginning is lost; a page in the middle, containing some fifty lines following upon verse 2338, has gone astray from our copy; and the end has been retouched by unskilful fingers. The unique manuscript in which the cantar exists belongs to the fourteenth century: so much is now settled after infinite disputes. The original composition is thought to date from about the middle third of the twelfth century (1135-75), some fifty years after the Cid's death at Valencia in 1099. Hence the Poem of the Cid stands almost midway between the Chanson de Roland and the Niebelungenlied. Nevertheless, in its surviving shape it is the result of innumerable retouches which amount to botching. Its authorship is more than doubtful, for the Per Abbat who obtrudes in the closing lines is, like the Turoldus of Roland, the mere transcriber of an unfaithful copy. Our gratitude to Per Abbat is dashed with regret for his slapdash methods. The assonants are roughly handled, whole phrases are unintelligently repeated, are transferred from one line to another, or are thrust out from the text, and in some cases two lines are crushed into one. The prevailing metre is the Alexandrine or fourteen-syllabled verse, probably adopted in conscious imitation of that Latin chronicle on the conquest of AlmerÍa which first reveals the national champion under his popular title—

However that may be, the normal measure is reproduced with curious infelicity. Some lines run to twenty syllables, some halt at ten, and it cannot be doubted that many of these irregularities are results of careless copying. Still, to Per Abbat we owe the preservation of the Cid cantar as we owe to SÁnchez its issue in 1779, more than half a century before any French chanson de geste was printed.

The Spanish epic has a twofold theme—the exploits of the exiled Cid, and the marriage of his two (mythical) daughters to the Infantes de CarriÓn. Diffused through Europe by the genius of Corneille, who conveyed his conception from GuillÉn de Castro, the legendary Cid differs hugely from the Cid of history. Uncritical scepticism has denied his existence; but Cervantes, with his good sense, hit the white in the first part of Don Quixote (chapter xlix.). Unquestionably the Cid lived in the flesh: whether or not his alleged achievements occurred is another matter. Irony has incidentally marked him for its own. The mercenary in the pay of Zaragozan emirs is fabled as the model Spanish patriot; the plunderer of churches becomes the flower of orthodoxy; the cunning intriguer who rifled Jews and mocked at treaties is transfigured as the chivalrous paladin; the unsentimental trooper who never loved is delivered unto us as the typical jeune premier. Lastly, the mirror of Spanish nationality is best known by his Arabic title (Sidi = lord). Yet two points must be kept in mind: the facts which discredit him are reported by hostile Arab historians; and, again, the Cid is entitled to be judged by the standard of his country and his time. So judged, we may accept the verdict of his enemies, who cursed him as "a miracle of the miracles of God and the conqueror of banners." Ruy Diaz de Bivar—to give him his true name—was something more than a freebooter whose deeds struck the popular fancy: he stood for unity, for the supremacy of Castile over LeÓn, and his example proved that, against almost any odds, the Spaniards could hold their own against the Moors. In the long night between the disaster of Alarcos and the crowning triumph of Navas de Tolosa, the Cid's figure grew glorious as that of the man who had never despaired of his country, and in the hour of victory the legend of his inspiration was not forgotten. From his death at Valencia in 1099, his memory became a national possession, embellished by popular poetic fancy.

In the Poema the treatment is obviously modelled upon the Chanson de Roland. But there is a fixed intent to place the Spaniard first. The Cid is pictured as more human than Roland: he releases his prisoners without ransom; he gives them money so that they may reach their homes. Charlemagne, in the Chanson, destroys the idols in the mosques, baptizes a hundred thousand Saracens by force, hangs or flays alive the recalcitrant; the Cid shows such humanity to a conquered province that on his departure the Moors burst forth weeping, and pray for his prosperous voyage. The machinery in both cases is very similar. As the archangel Gabriel appears to Charlemagne, he appears likewise to the Cid Campeador. Bishop Turpin opens the battle in Roland, and Bishop Jerome heads the charge for Spain. Roland and Ruy Diaz are absolved and exhorted to the same effect, and the resemblance of the epithet curunez applied to the French bishop is too close to the coronado of the Spaniard to be accidental. But allowing for the fact that the Spanish juglar borrows his framework, his performance is great by virtue of its simplicity, its strength, its spirit and fire. Whether he deals with the hungry loyalty of the Cid in exile, or his reception into favour by an ingrate king; whether he celebrates the overthrow of the Count of Barcelona or the surrender of Valencia; whether he sings the nuptials of Elvira and Sol with the Infantes de CarriÓn, or the avenging Cid who seeks reparation from his craven son-in-law, the touch is always happy and is commonly final.

There is an unity of conception and of language which forbids our accepting the Poema as the work of several hands; and the division of the poem into separate cantares is managed with a discretion which argues a single artistic intelligence. The first part closes with the marriage of the hero's daughters; the second with the shame of the Infantes de CarriÓn, and the proud announcement that the kings of Spain are sprung from the Cid's loins. In both the singer rises to the level of his subject, but his chiefest gust is in the recital of some brilliant deed of arms. Judge him when, in a famous passage well rendered by Ormsby, he sings the charge of the Cid at Alcocer:—

Indubitably this (and it were easy to match it elsewhere in the Poema) is the work of an original genius who redeems his superficial borrowings of incident from Roland by a treatment all his own. That he knew the French models is evident from his skilful conveyance of the bear episode in Ider to his own pages, where the Cid encounters the beast as a lion. But the language shows no hint of French influence, and both thought and expression are profoundly national. The poet's name is irrecoverable, but the internal evidence points strongly to the conclusion that he came from the neighbourhood of Medina Celi. The surmise that he was an Asturian rests solely upon the absence of the diphthong ue from his lines, an inference on the face of it unwarrantable. Against this is the topographical minuteness with which the poet reports the sallies of the Cid in the districts of CastejÓn and Alcocer; his marked ignorance of the country round Zaragoza and Valencia, his detailed description of the central episode—the outrage upon the Cid's daughters in the wood of Corpes, near Berlanga; and the important fact that the four chief itineraries in the Poema are charged with minutiÆ from Molina to San Esteban de Gormaz, while they grow vague and more confused as they extend towards Burgos and Valencia. The most probable conjecture, then, is that the unknown maker of this primitive masterpiece came from the Valle de Arbujuelo; and it is worth adding that this opinion is supported by the authority of Sr. MenÉndez Pidal. Perhaps the greatest testimony to the early poet's worth is to be found in this: that his conception of his hero has outlived the true historic Cid, and has forced the child of his imagination upon the acceptance of mankind.

Even more fantastic is the personality of Ruy Diaz as rendered by the anonymous compiler of the CrÓnica Rimada (Rhymed Chronicle of Events in Spain from the Death of King Pelayo to Ferdinand the Great, and more especially of the Adventures of the Cid). The composition which bears this clumsy and inappropriate title is better named the Cantar de Rodrigo, and consists of 1125 lines, preceded by a scrap of rugged prose. Not till after digressions into other episodes, and irrelevant stories of Miro and Bernardo, Bishops of Palencia, probably fellow-townsmen of the compiler, does the Cid appear. He is no longer, as in the Poema, a popular hero, idealised from historic report; he is a purely imaginary figure, incrusted with a mass of fables accumulated in course of time. At the age of twelve he slays GÓmez GÓrmaz (an almost impossible style, compounded of a patronymic and the name of a castle belonging to the Cid), is claimed by the dead man's daughter, weds her, vanquishes the Moors, and leads his King's—Fernando's—troops to the gates of Paris, defeating the Count of Savoy upon the road. One legend is heaped upon another, and the poem, the end of which is lost, breaks off with the Pope's request for a year's truce, which Fernando, acting as ever upon the Cid's advice, magnanimously extends for twelve years. It is hard to say whether the Cantar de Rodrigo as we have it is the production of a single composer, or whether it is a patchwork by different hands, arranged from earlier poems, and eked out by prose stories and by oral traditions. The versification is that of the simple sixteen-syllabled line, each hemistich of which forms a typical romance line. This in itself is a sign of its later date, and to this must be added the traces of deliberate imitation of the Poema, and the writer's familiarity with such modern devices as heraldic emblems. Further, the use of a ProvenÇal form like gensor, the unmistakable tokens of French influence, the anticipation of the metre of the clerkly poems, the writer's frank admission of earlier songs on the same subject, the metamorphosis of the Cid into a feudal baron, and, above all, the decadent spirit of the entire work: these are tokens which imply a relative modernity. Much of the obscurity of language, which has been mistaken for archaism, is simply due to the defects of the manuscript; and the evidence goes to show that the Rodrigo, put together in the last decade of the twelfth century or the first of the thirteenth, was retouched in the fourteenth by Spanish juglares humiliated by the recent French invasions. Even so, much of the primitive pastiche remains, and the Rodrigo, which is mentioned in the General Chronicle, interests us as being the fountain-head of those romances on the Cid whose collection we owe to that enthusiastic and most learned investigator, Madame Carolina MichaËlis de Vasconcellos. Far inferior in merit and interest to the Poema, the Rodrigo ranks with it as representative of the submerged mass of cantares de gesta, and is rightly valued as the venerable relic of a lost school.

To these succeed three anonymous poems, the Libro de Apolonio (Book of Apollonius), the Vida de Santa MarÍa Egipciaqua (Life of St. Mary the Egyptian), and the Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient (Book of the Three Eastern Kings), all discovered in one manuscript in the Escurial Library by Pedro JosÉ Pidal, and first published by him in 1844. The story of Apollonius, supposed to be a translation of a Greek romance, filters into European literature by way of the Gesta Romanorum, is found even in Icelandic and Danish versions, and is familiar to English readers of Pericles. The nameless Spanish arranger of the thirteenth century (probably a native of AragÓn) gives the story of Apollonius' adventures with force and clearness, anticipating in the character of Tarsiana the type of Preciosa, the heroine of Cervantes' Gitanilla and of Weber's opera. Unfortunately the closing tags of moralisings on the vanity of life destroy the effect which the writer has produced by his free translation. His text is suffused with ProvenÇalisms, and his mono-rhymed quatrains of fourteen syllables are evidence of French or ProvenÇal origin. This metrical novelty, extending over more than six hundred stanzas, is properly regarded by the author as his chief distinction, and he implores God and the Virgin to guide him in the exercise of the new mastery (nueva maestrÍa). It is fair to add that his experiment has the interest of novelty, that it succeeded beyond measure in its time, and that its monotonous vogue endured for some two hundred years.

To the same period belongs the Vida de Santa MarÍa Egipciaqua, the earliest Castilian example of verses of nine syllables. In substance it is a version of the Vie de Saint Marie l'Egyptienne, ascribed without much reason to the veritable Bishop of Lincoln, Robert Grosseteste (? 1175-1253), among whose Carmina Anglo-Normannica the French original is interpolated. The Spanish version follows the French lead with almost pedantic exactitude; but the metre, new and well suited to the common ear, is handled with an easy grace remarkable in a first effort. As happens with other works of this time, the title of the short Libre dels Tres Reyes dorient is misleading. The visit of the Magi is briefly dismissed in the first fifty lines, the poem turning chiefly upon the Flight into Egypt, the miracle wrought upon the leprous child of the robber, and the identification of the latter with the repentant thief of the New Testament. Like its predecessor, this legend is given in nine-syllabled verse, and is undoubtedly borrowed from a French or ProvenÇal source not yet discovered.

In the Disputa del Alma y el Cuerpo (Argument betwixt Body and Soul), a subject which passes into all mediÆval literatures from a copy of Latin verses styled Rixa Animi et Corporis, there is a recurrence, though with innumerable variants of measure, to the Alexandrine type. Thus it is sought to reproduce the music of the model, an Anglo-Norman poem, written in rhymed couplets of six syllables, and wrongly attributed to Walter Map. With it should go the Debate entre el Agua y el Vino (Debate between Water and Wine), and the first Castilian lyric, RazÓn feita d'Amor (the Lay of Love). Composed in verses of nine syllables, the poem deals with the meeting of two lovers, their colloquy, interchanges, and separation. Both pieces, discovered within the last seventeen years by M. Morel-Fatio, are the productions of a single mind. It is tempting to identify the writer with the Lope de Moros mentioned in the final line, "Lupus me feÇit de Moros"; still the likelihood is that, here as elsewhere, the copyist has but signed his transcription. Whoever the author may have been—and the internal evidence tends to show that he was a clerk familiar with French, ProvenÇal, Italian, or Portuguese exemplars—he shines by virtue of qualities which are akin to genius. His delicacy and variety of sentiment, his finish of workmanship, his deliberate lyrical effects, announce the arrival of the equipped artist, the craftsman no longer content with rhymed narration, the singer with a personal, distinctive note. Here was a poet who recognised that in literature—the least moral of the arts—the end justifies the means; hence he transformed the material which he borrowed, made it his own possession, and conveyed into Castile a new method adapted to her needs. But time and language were not yet ripe, and the Spanish lyric flourished solely in Galicia: it was not to be transplanted at a first attempt. Yet the attempt was worth the trial; for it closes the anonymous period with a triumph to which, if we except the Poema del Cid, it can show no fellow.