Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 18.djvu/470

* SPANISH LITERATURE. 401) SPANISH LITERATURE. Salas), done to death through the perfidy ot their uncle and aunt, and later avenged by their Moorish half brother, Mudarra. Here, also, the legend is preserved b}' the Vro- nica general, which has, in this case, absorbed many verses of the Old Spanish poems on the subject without wholly obliterating their rhyme and metre. By good fortune we still possess two of the Old Spanish poems dealing with the story of the doughtiest of all the native heroes, the Uid (q.v.), an historical personage of the eleventh century. The Poema del Cid has survived in but a single and incomplete manuscript of the four- teenth century, and, besides, its versification is in an exceedingly corrupt state. There are two main divisions (or cantares) ; the first begins with Eodrigo's exile from Castile, and ends with the conquest of Valencia and the marriage of his two daughters to the unhistorical Infantes of Carrion; in the second, the necessity of punishing the In- fantes for their abuse and desertion of their spouses brings the Cid to the Court of Castile and affords an opportunity for completely reconcil- ing him and liis liege lord. The poem ends with a second marriage of the Cid's daughters, who, now wedding the princes of Barcelona and Na- varre, make the Cid an ancestor of the later royal house of Spain. An imaginative account of the Cid's youth is found in the poem termed the C'rotiica rimada, a document of the thirteenth cen- tury relating particularly Rodrigo's slaying of Count Gormaz and the marriage of the youthful slayer to the Count's daughter, Ximena. Much greater than the bulk ot the heroic poetry preserved is that of Old Spanish religious, didac- tic, and narrative verse. The greater part of this verse is in the form of quatrains of alexan- drines, with a single rhyme in the stanza (the so-called ciiaderna via). There is no knowledge of the existence of this learned poetry before the thirteenth century, but in the first half of that pe- riod it is found fully developed in a mystery play, in translations from the French or Provencal, and in poems. The mystery play, which is incom- plete, is El misterio de los reyes magos. It is an outgrowth of the liturgical dramas or offices of the Church. No other important remains of the early Spanish drama have been discovered. Of the matter composed in cuadenia via a large proportion is due to the cleric Gonzalo de Ber- ceo, who is the first Spanish poet that we know by name. He flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. Most of his productions deal with religious subjects. There is now attributed to him furthermore a long poem dealing with pro- fane matter, the Lihro de Alexandre, which re- lates in some 2500 stanzas the life of Alexander the Great. With the end of the thirteenth and the begin- ning of the the fourteenth century the use of the cuadenia via began to yield to prose in didactic composition. Contemporary with this change appeared the first true poet in Spanish literature, Juan Ruiz, who is known as the Archpriest of Hita. He belonged to the reign of Alfonso XI. ( 1312-50) . and he was impris- oned by his superiors because of his evil life : but, like the French poet Villon, he sang with the true note of passion. In his Cantares (called by him El lihro de huen antor) he recounts bis erotic adventures, interspersing here and there many fa- bles, descriptions of his disputes with Love ( Don Amor), an account of a lesson which Venus, wife of Don Amor, gave him, etc. Spanish prose, at first clumsy and labored, ear- liest appeared in law codes and official docu- ments. The first use of Spanish prose for chron- icle purposes is seen in the two Anales Toledanos put together before 1250. Between 1217 and 1223 were written certain genealogies and translations from Latin chroniclers were made in following years. Under the direction of Saint Ferdinand was begun the encyclopaedic Septenario, which his son, Alfonso, completed, and there was planned a codification of Castilian laws. The prose thus formed, employed largely for didactic and his- torical works, was applied to fiction in the framework tales of .Juan Manuel. Alfonso X., the Wise, wrote, or had written under his direc- tion, many works dealing with the science of the time. Great value attaches to the so-called Crdnica general, in which, availing himself of earlier Latin chronicles, hg dealt with the history of his land from the earliest times down to the period of his own accession. Moralizing works and collections of sententious sayings drawn from Arabic sources or written in imitation of them became rife both in Alfonso's time and in the ensuing period. One of the Arabic moral anthologies thus introduced into Spanish was the very popular Bocados de oro, which lived on in the poetical aphorisms of Sem Tob and Santillana. Sancho IV. (1284-95), the successor of Alfonso X., inherited his father's love for letters, and by his direction there were prepared translations from Latin, French, and Provencal. The interest- ing translation, the Oran conguista de Ultramar, dealing with the Crusades, preserves the sub- stance of French literary monuments now lost. This and other translations show a broadening interest in foreign literature, further exemplified in an early fourteenth-century version of the prose Tristan. To the first half of the same cen- tury may be ascribed the first independent exam- ple of Spanish prose fiction, the Caballero Cifar, and possibly also the Amadis, for the chivalrous romance seems already to be beginning its long period of popular favor. Literature was not especially favored by San- cho's immediate successor, but a monarch of in- tellectual force appeared again in Alfonso XI. The most important of the works which were pre- pared under liis direction was a series ot chron- icles that should close the gap between his own time and the period with which the Cronica gene- ral of Alfonso X. ended, a work which formed the basis of the Poema de Alfonso XI. Don .Juan Manuel (1282-1345), a nephew of Alfonso X., played a more direct part in the development of letters at this time, being, like his uncle, one of the greatest prose writers in early Span- ish literature. The most interesting and impor- tant of his many treatises is the famous frame- work of tales called the Conde Lucanor or Lihro de Patronio. in which Count Lucanor, seeking ad- vice from his tutor. Patronio, is answered by the latter with moralizing tales conveying the neces- sary counsel. The contents of the fifty-one tales comprise historical or pseudo-historical elements relating to Spain, matters of personal experience, Arabic traditions, besides elements drawn from Pluedrus, the Calila et Dinum. the Barlaam stoiy, and above all the general European stock