Chapter XXIII: Toledo and El Greco 244 (4)

Not one perhaps in a hundred of those who visit Seville and Granada sees more than a glimpse of the beautiful country and curious villages of Andalucía; yet there is much pleasure and interest to be had from a journey through all this region. In February an early start with the sun will enable the traveller on horseback or on foot to accomplish a fair day’s journey, since the sun has not yet begun to burn and force him to rest for some six central hours of the day, as later in the year. And the outlines on every side are exquisitely clear, the sky usually cloudless, and streams flow where later there will be but dry channels. In parts the fields and roadside spaces are blue and purple with dwarf-irises (the peasants call them simply _lirios_, lilies), and the almond-trees are in flower; and at no time of the year is there a greater and more delightful contrast between spring in the valley and winter on the hills. Near Seville the immense plains stretch interminably to the faint mountains, brown and dull-green pastures of heather and dwarf-palm, flecked with silver-white streaks of water; herds of cattle, glossy black with white horns, pigs, horses, and great flocks of sheep graze there. Or the country is gently undulating like Sussex downs, but with softlier-moulded outlines and a horizon of faint blue mountains, in February exquisitely distinct in faintness. A village often entirely covers one of the small hills, not a house venturing forward to form an outskirt, but all clustered and compact. Steep, perfectly straight streets of sharp narrow cobbles, without side pavements, run up to the church at the top through rows of low, whitewashed houses, of a single storey and of a dazzling whiteness. At evening the labourers come in from the far distant fields in a continuous line, on foot or on mules and donkeys, and children go out to meet them and are given a ride back into the village. Sometimes their return is of several kilomètres, over deep earthy or stony paths, and, with their gleaming mattocks (_pioches_, _azadones_) over their shoulders, they are now to be seen clearly outlined on the evening sky, and now are lost from view in one of the many hollows of the hills. Far and near there is no tree, “neither bush nor shrub to bear off any weather at all,” and the winds seem to have sifted and moulded the hills into softly folding mounds and hollows. In February the winds still blow occasionally with icy breath, and you will meet men on crimson and magenta-tasselled mules and donkeys, closely wrapped in old-fashioned _capas_ of brown, only their eyes visible. On the road there are few travellers--charcoal-burners coming down with troops of laden donkeys from the hills, or a slow cart drawn by a string of mules, the driver lazily asleep, and the reins appearing from between the soles of his sandals,[92] or a troop of gipsies, or orange sellers with the panniers of their mules brimmed with oranges, now selling at six _reales_, a little over a shilling, the hundred. Sometimes the country is all grey-pinched and icy, and but a little further (as near snow-white Arcos de la Frontera) are great hedges of shrubs and aloes and brambles and cactus, with a sound of bees, and hovering white and yellow butterflies, and wide spaces of tall branched flowers of asphodel and grey scented rosemary. Or in a corner of windswept hills you may find a sheltered _huerta_ with thick hedge of tall black cypresses; the oranges crowd the trees with gold, and the almond-trees shed across the dusty road a thick carpet of broken flowers, pink and white. To Grazalema leads only a steep and narrow foot-path after one has left the road not far from Algodonales (pronounced by the peasants in a torrent of vowels Aooae) and crossed the river Guadalete. In the valley the oranges gleam in myriads, and the hills immediately above are coloured with a continuous spray of almond-trees in flower, entirely covering their sides, and sometimes crowning them in triumph. And far above, over woods of cork and evergreen oak from which rise frail blue lines of smoke from charcoal-burners’ fires, appear two or three peaks of snow clear against a pale blue sky. The path goes up along hedges of brambles through asphodels and hundreds of trailing periwinkles, with stepping-stones and flowing streams; here and there a snow-white olive-oil mill with sentinel cypresses. And, below, the pale snow-fed Guadalete flows swiftly over white stones through groves of oranges. From a distance Grazalema gives the fanciful idea of broken shells on a stony shore, with its houses of white and pink and brown, many of them overhanging and seeming to grow out of steep rocks. From the village a path leads through corkwoods, the stripped trunks of the trees a deep maroon colour, to Ronda on its sheer hill. From Antequera to Málaga by road is some fifty kilomètres, and here, too, are wonderful contrasts and sudden change from winter to summer. In the unsheltered plains round Bobadilla the almond-trees show no sign of flower, and the grey mountains above the stern frowning towers of Antequera are ice-bound. Turning the pass, appears a magnificent view of six or seven serrated hill-ranges to the line of sea beyond hidden Málaga--on the left a fantastically jagged range, sprinkled in parts with snow; on the right a long line of snow-mountains that ends in a bare range rising purple from the sea. And the ice soon grows thin and vanishes, giving place to irises, tiny jonquils, and periwinkles, and descending half-way down the mountain side, to Villanueva, the almond-trees have already lost half their blossoms, grass and white dusty road and dark new-ploughed soil are thickly strewn with their petals, and the fields of broad beans are in scented black and white flower. Along the coast full summer reigns, the balconies are heavy with trailing flowers, the sea is deepest blue, and the wind blows half-sultrily across the fields of beans and the faded-green leaves of sugar-cane, with their scent of hay. Sometimes the road is lined with poplars, and ox-carts go laden with grass and trefoil and leaves from the sugar-canes. Elsewhere the road winds inland through grey rocky hills and woods of strong-scented pines, with glimpses of blue sea; or passes high above cliffs, the sea swelling dull green immediately below or foaming round dark rocks. From Motril or some other point one may go up to Granada, the Sierra Nevada appearing and altering continually; and thoughts of the Alhambra and other names of magic shorten the road, though it has many a beautiful view and village, such as Pino to the left on the mountain side, with its white houses and deep red-brown roofs. But of the many fair districts of Andalucía perhaps the most delightful in scenery is that lying between the Guadalquivir and La Mancha, a region of brushwood and mountain. The road from Marmolejo runs up through hills covered with shrubs of every shade of green, from grey-blue to shrill yellow, many of them scented, lentiscus, escalonia, _adelfa_, cistus, rosemary, and a hundred more; even in February the mid-day sun scents the whole air with them. Near the village of Cardeña, some thirty miles from Marmolejo, a ruin is supposed to be that of the inn where many scenes of “Don Quixote” occurred, but only a few stones remain. Leaving the village in early morning in frost and ice in order to go down to Montoro on the Guadalquivir, the road at first is wild, bordered by oak-trees, with flocks of sheep, a few patches of corn, many magpies, the plaining of birds and the occasional whirr of a partridge. Yet even here in a few hollows are vines and almond-trees, and spaces of scented plants and wild yellow jonquils, with white or brown or yellow butterflies, a humming of bees and rustling of lizards. The road now cuts through hills of scented shrubs, so various and ordered with such careful harmony as could be rivalled by no garden planted by man. On either side are range and range of hills shrub-covered, dull green, brown and blue, brown where the shrubs have been cut for firing. To the right is a wide deep gorge with tiny river far below, and glimpses of blue distances and valleys of more hills. To the left more hills, and across a blue distance of hill valleys the Sierra de Jaen with its beautiful pyramid-shaped peak of deepest snow, and far to the right of it the two more pointed peaks of Granada’s Sierra Nevada, marvellously clear in distance. Between them and the Sierra de Jaen runs the snow-sprinkled range above the village of Los Villares de Jaen. In the transparent might of even a February noon the more distant and the higher of the near hills are purple, and the great snow-mountains below the snow-line grow faint and grey. Montoro is a beautiful quaint town rising above the Guadalquivir in seven or eight storeys of houses of red stone and whitewash. The tall church-tower, also of red stone, stands massively above the town, and precipitously steep and cobbled streets lead up to it. Houses look sheer down from windows, balconies, and gardens to the river far below, which flows over a weir above and below the town, so that there is a perpetual sound of rushing water. From Montoro one may follow the Guadalquivir, now a majestic river, through its olive groves to the famous bridge of Alcolea, and the low white line beneath bare hills and wooded mountains which is Córdoba, seen from the East. Everywhere on the roads and in the inns of Andalucía the peasants are courteous, pleasant, intelligent, picturesque; always ready to give any service in their power, often immensely ignorant. They will ask if “Ingalaterra” is not Spain’s border-country and confuse it with Gibraltar, or if the Queen was a Christian before her marriage. For the most part they cannot read or write;[93] yet they converse willingly on the most various subjects, especially on politics and religion, the mayor and the priest. Here a woman complains: “Nine children I had, and the nine are dead; it’s better so in these times of misery”; there a peasant describes the snowy Sierra in the month of August, how it glows whiter than lilies across the plain--_más blanca, que una azucena_; or tells how beautiful is the country in later spring when the quinces, apples, and pomegranates are in flower, _que es un paraiso_--a very paradise. As they sit round the _candela_, in the cold evenings of early spring, talk flows on into the night, always pleasant and courteous, as of one _gran señor_ to another.

XVI

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPANISH LITERATURE

There is not a literature in Europe more individual than that of Spain. It has been influenced greatly at various times by other countries, especially Italy and France, but in its many masterpieces it has a flavour of the soil, a local colouring that is all its own. Even when Spanish authors have borrowed most freely they have usually succeeded in casting their own individuality over their “honourable kind of thieving.” Who has a more individual genius than Juan Ruiz, the merry Archpriest of Hita? Yet it has been shown that his debt to French, Latin, and other authors is very considerable. In this form of borrowing--practised by Shakespeare--which is not a direct imitation but a loan of bricks to make them marble, there is in fact a high originality. The phrase in which the merits of the Marqués de Santillana have been summed up might be applied to the whole of Spanish literature: when it ceases to imitate it is inimitable. Santillana’s mountain songs--his _serranillas_ are scented as it were with the thyme of the Castilian hills, whereas his sonnets in the Italian manner are colourless and artificial.

Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly speaks of “that forcible realistic touch, that alert vision, that intense impression of the thing seen and accurately observed which give to Spanish literature its peculiar stamp of authenticity.” The clear atmosphere of Spain, in which distant mountains seem to be close at hand, is also the atmosphere of Spanish literature. The Spaniard may have little subtlety of insight or critical judgment, but he has a directness of vision that has manifested itself in bigotry, brutality, and cynical satire, as well as in keen humour, straight-forwardness, and dignity of character. The realism which has produced the terrible Christs of the Cathedrals, with their long human hair and life-like wounds, or the polychrome statues of Spanish carvers, with a presentation of pain on the human face in all and more than all its horror--this realism may be due either to a hatred of all that is false and factitious or to a lack of sensibility, an inability to sympathize without a harsh shock, a thrill of terrified awe. What would the Greeks have said to these tortured features, these agonizing brows and flowing wounds? It is as false art to perpetuate in wood or stone the agony of a few culminating moments as it is to picture a face laughing or yawning, from whose perpetually open mouth we will soon turn with a laugh or a yawn. This realism has found a less harsh expression in Spanish literature, as in the sane and brilliant art of Velázquez. The brutality occasionally makes itself felt, as in some of Quevedo’s bitter writings, but most often the spirit is nobler and more human. In the twelfth-century “Poema del Cid” all the figures stand out in wonderful clearness, from the Cid himself to the nine years’ old child at Burgos, who tells the Cid that they dare not open their doors to him for fear of the King’s edict. And the events of the poem are brought to pass before our eyes with a joyful zest and rapidity and a stamp of truth that are worthy of Homer. We see the Cid ride with a hundred chosen knights across the Bridge of Alcántara and up Toledo’s narrow streets. We see him knocking at the gate of San Pedro de Cardeña to bid farewell to his wife Doña Jimena, and the abbot, who was saying Mass for the return of dawn, running out with lights and torches to welcome “him who was born in happy hour.” We see him again in battle as the pennants rise and fall, we hear “the sword’s griding screech” and the trampling of the horses at which the earth trembles. In “Celestina,” the long prose drama of the end of the fifteenth century, we have the same truth to life, though in very different scenes. Here it is not knights and battles, but common people of the street--the old hag Celestina, or Calisto’s servants--that are drawn with a master hand.

“Celestina” gives some inkling of the picaresque novels to come, of which the flower and cream is “Lazarillo de Tormes” (1554 is the date of our earliest edition), to be followed by “Guzmán de Alfarache,” “El Buscón,” and a long posterity in Spain, France, and England. This is no tale of true love like the “Celestina,” but of gnawing hunger and of the ingenious efforts of Lazarillo to procure himself bread. His successive masters, the blind beggar, the miserly priest, the penniless Castilian gentleman, the rascally seller of Papal bulls, are sketched in the autobiography of their servant Lazarillo, with the keen eye of famine, and are unforgettable, as is Lazarillo himself, whose name has become the common name in Spain for a blind man’s guide, just as Victor Hugo’s immortal Gavroche gave his name to the Paris _gamin_. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of seven short chapters, lively in every sentence, of a direct and biting humour, perhaps the most graphic story ever penned. A few terse phrases throw a scene or a character into amazingly high relief, and the picture is as fresh and living to-day as when it first appeared three and a half centuries ago. No other country and no other language could have produced a piece of realism so cynically bare, so completely charming. It has the caustic pithiness of Spanish proverbs, the bitter flavour of harsh Iberia. It belongs to life rather than to literature, but life portrayed with the restraint and force of a consummate art. It was early translated into English as “The Marvelus Dedes and the Lyf of Lazaro de Tormes.” The authorship of “Lazarillo” has been ascribed to this man and to that, and there has been great argument about it and about, without the least degree of certainty. The name of Hurtado de Mendoza is frequently to be found upon the title-page. Born in 1503, he was alive when the novel appeared; he was an author; he could write in trenchant, nay, in scurrilous style, as his letters concerning the Pope show--he calls him an old rascal, _vellaco_; but these are hardly conclusive proofs. Whoever the author, the work still reigns supreme, though many may have thought with Ginés de Pasamonte in “Don Quixote” that it would be an evil moment for “Lazarillo” when their memoirs appeared. Half a century after “Lazarillo” the same faithfulness to picaresque reality, with a broader outlook and a more universal sympathy, is to be found in the “Novelas Ejemplares” of Cervantes. Rinconete and Cortadillo, the eponymous heroes of one of his best-known stories, are closely related to Lazarillo; they are in fact the Lazarillos of the South of Spain. On the realism of “Don Quixote” it is unnecessary to lay stress. Mr. Fitzmaurice-Kelly, referring to its immediate triumph, says: “To contemporary readers the charm of ‘Don Quixote’ lay in its amalgamation of imaginative and realistic elements, in its accumulated episodes, in its infinite sympathy and its persuasive humour. There was no question, then, as to whether ‘Don Quixote’ was a well of symbolic doctrine. The canvas was crowded with types familiar to every one who had eyes to see his companions on the dusty highways of Spain. The wenches who served Don Quixote with stockfish and black bread; the lad Andrés, flayed in the grove of oaks by Juan Haldudo the Rich of Quintanar; the goatherds seated round the fire on which the pot of salted goat was simmering; the three lively needle-makers from the Colt of Córdoba; the midnight procession escorting the dead body from Baeza to Segovia, and chanting dirges on the road; the dozen galley-slaves tramping on, strung together like beads on an iron chain; all these are observed and presented with masterly precision of detail.”[94]

In spite of Censors and Inquisitors Spanish literature was free and outspoken, for it portrayed life as it was. If it shows devotion to Church and King it is because these were deeply-rooted national convictions. But the priests sometimes meet with less respect. The Cid threatens to make of the Pope’s vestments trappings for his horse, and we have seen that Hurtado de Mendoza, the King of Spain’s ambassador in Rome, speaks of his Holiness in terms that call to mind Benvenuto Cellini’s passionate outbursts. We have seen, too, the unflattered portraits of priest and pardon-seller in “Lazarillo de Tormes.” Cervantes, who “respects and adores the Church as a Catholic and faithful Christian,” does not fail to thrust fun at the fat _alforjas_, the well-provisioned saddle-bags of the _señores clérigos_, “who rarely allow themselves to fare ill,” and he deals more sternly with the household priests who “govern princes’ houses, and, not being of princely birth themselves, are unable to guide the conduct of those who are,” and who “in trying to teach those they govern to be narrow and limited make them miserable.” He gives us the picture of the false pilgrims who travel through the length and breadth of Spain, “and there is not a village in which they do not receive meat and drink and at least a _real_ in money, and at the end of their journey they leave the country with a treasure of over a hundred ducats,” and he even allows himself to wonder why Ginés de Pasamonte’s clever monkey has not been arraigned before the gentlemen of the Inquisition.

There are in Spanish literature occasional signs of a distorted imagination, a restless longing to materialize the invisible, which is not a fanciful dreaming, but rather a kind of super-realism, a strained and persistent effort to attain a tangible perfection--the spirit which in some Spanish buildings has added ornament to ornament till the result is a rich magnificence in an infinity of details but hideousness as a whole. One form of this we have in such works as Quevedo’s “Sueños,” another, the Churrigueresque, in the later style of Góngora. On the other hand, we have the great Spanish mystics in their sincerity, reflected in the exquisite simplicity of their style, one of the noblest glories of the literature of their country. Yet they, too, as has often been pointed out, were pre-eminently practical; Luis de León, for instance, energetic head of the Augustinian Order; Santa Teresa, the wise, untiring administrator. Their writings have the fiery transparency of Pascal, and all the clear and vivid precision of military writers of many countries, in whose case, as in that of so large a number of Spaniards, “the lance has not blunted the pen.”[95] The mystics rise to noble heights of sublimity, but the virtue of their writing is that it is to the point, with no vague rhetoric; and no advocate could surpass the lucidity with which Luis de León conducted his own defence before the Inquisition.

Perhaps the weakest side of Spanish literature is its deficiency in critical insight. Few, indeed, are the Spanish authors of whom it might be said, as Ticknor said long ago of Luis de León, that there is scarcely a line of their poetry that is not exquisite. Espronceda’s undeniable genius, for instance, shatters itself on that unwieldy fragment “El Diablo Mundo.” Excessive facility of composition has been the stumbling-block of the authors as it has been the stumbling-block of the orators of Spain. Hardly a speaker in the Spanish _Cortes_ is ever at a loss for words to give expression to his ideas or to conceal the lack of them. Each, as Don Adriano de Armado in “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” is one

“That hath a mint of phrases in his brain,
One whom the music of his own vain tongue
Doth ravish like enchanting harmony.”

Even so marvellous an orator as Emilio Castelar was at times carried away by the magnificent eloquence that flowed unfailingly from his lips. In the same way Lope de Vega could throw off a play in a few days. Over 2000 plays and _autos_ are ascribed to him, and in the 450 that remain his most ardent admirers confess that there are arid tracts. And, ordinarily, this copiousness has been a fault, telling against Spanish literature, and it continues to be a fault: Señor Blasco Ibáñez writes his brilliant novels in evident haste; Señor Perez Galdós has entered on the fifth series of ten of his “Episodios Nacionales,” and his other novels and plays are very numerous. Such wealth of production could not but be harmful to critical judgment. In the nineteenth century Spain produced one or two excellent critics, especially Larra and _Clarín_, the pseudonym of Leopoldo Alas, author of “La Regenta,” one of the most striking psychological novels of the century. Generally, however, if German literary criticism is circular and, however illuminating the by-paths of its learning, wanders round the point without ever quite touching it, Spanish literary criticism is superficial, and either veils the point in a polite mesh of words, or is prevented by this very rhetoric from seeing the point at all. Even Valera, who so carefully limned his own prose, and whose verse, though not inspired, is always delicate and polished, was far from being a good critic. He praised effusively works that at best deserved silence, and this insincerity in literary matters is, it is to be feared, a common weakness in Spain.

The characteristic of Spanish literature that unites it in a special bond of sympathy with English literature is its large store of humour. It meets us in the “Poema del Cid,” in the character of the Cid, and in the quick detection of the ludicrous; the poems of the Archpriest of Hita are full of merriment and of humorous portrayal of character; the humour of the Archpriest reappears in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” but without his jovial gaiety; with Quevedo its vein becomes cruelly satirical. Humour did not desert Luis de León when ill and solitary in the dark Valladolid prison of the Inquisition; and it is to be found in a large majority of Spanish authors, being but another side of their direct, unclouded observation. In the most humorous of all books, even Don Quixote, the Knight of the Sad Countenance, is constrained to laugh: at the sight of Sancho, we read, his melancholy was not strong enough to prevent him from joining in his laughter--and the whole world laughs with, not at him.

It is because Spanish literature is intensely national that it has so universal an interest, and in its most recent phase, the novel, it has a local character that is full of charm. José María de Pereda, for instance, scarcely ever left his native Cantabrian province. He wrote of the places and people that he understood and loved. Yet no one who has read his great novels, “El Sabor de la Tierruca,” or “Sotileza,” or “Peñas Arriba,” will contend that they are provincial, or that their interest is merely local.[96] His characters are universal, and Pereda is another instance of the truth that he who digs a little land deep reaps a better reward than he who works shallowly over a wide extent. So Señor Blasco Ibáñez is read with most delight when he cultivates his own garden--the city and province of Valencia.

XVII

THE POEM OF THE CID

1.--A PRIMITIVE MASTERPIECE

The national hero of Spain has been presented in many guises, but is nowhere more intensely Spanish than in the “Poema del Cid.” Here are no marvellous events and miracles, no journeyings out of Spain to Paris and Rome; everything occurs naturally and simply in Spanish surroundings, and this the first great masterpiece of Spanish letters has a strong flavour of the soil. After winning a “victory marvellous and great” over the Moors in Spain, the Cid says, “I give thanks to God who is Master of the world; I was in want before, now I am rich, for I have goods and land and gold and honour.... Moors and Christians live in great fear of me. There, inland in Morocco, where the Mosques are, they look to have some night an inroad from me. It is but their fear, for I think not of it. I shall not go to seek them, in Valencia shall I be.” The Cid is chivalrous, brave, magnanimous, simple, with a strong sense of humour and love of fair-play. With simple good faith the poet sees no need to explain or excuse actions of his hero that may seem blameworthy to a later age, such as the deceit practised upon the two Jews. Though not historical, the poem has an air of truth and sincerity deeply impressive. It was probably composed in the middle of the twelfth century, not much more than fifty years after the Cid’s death in 1099. It has been attributed to the beginning of the thirteenth century, but intrinsic evidence warrants the earlier date. The language is more archaic than that of thirteenth-century writers. Traces of the Latin chrysalis appear. “To-morrow morning” is _cras á la mañana_, half Latin and half Spanish, and “each” in the same way is _quiscadauno_, while the word _huebos_, which frequently occurs in the sense of _menester_, is but the Latin _opus_ thinly disguised. The poem, as it has come down to us incomplete, has nearly four thousand verses. It is written in long assonant lines of unequal number of syllables. “The poet,” as Tomas Antonio Sánchez, who first edited the “Poema del Cid” in 1779, remarks, “thought nothing of giving two or three syllables more to a line as his sentence might require,” and lines of eleven and lines of eighteen syllables occur indifferently. From beginning to end the story moves on without flagging; the style is so rapid and direct that it carries the reader with it. There is a joy and freshness in the narrative that have rarely been surpassed.[97] These events may not have happened, or may have happened differently, but that matters little, since, owing to the skill of the unknown poet, they stand out with a vividness that imprints them indelibly on the mind of the reader and proves that nothing is so real as that which has not happened. Who can forget, for instance, the arrival of King Alfonso and the Cid at Toledo, when the King passes on into the town, but the Cid remains on the further side of the Tagus, in the castle of San Serván (now a beautiful ruin with two Moorish windows still left, and surrounded by dwarf-asphodels in spring). He says to the King: “I with mine will rest in San Serván; this evening will my followers arrive. I will hold vigil in that holy place; to-morrow morning I will enter the city.” Here he and his followers “said matins and prime until the dawn,” and next day they enter Toledo, the Cid splendidly attired and accompanied by a hundred knights, riding across the bridge of Alcántara and up the steep and narrow street to the Court or Parliament.[98] Every detail of his dress is given, purple and gold and silver. But fresh and quaintly vivid details are frequent in the poem. When the counts of Carrión have outraged and abandoned their wives the poet pauses to exclaim, “What good fortune were the Cid Campeador to appear.” Félez Muñoz, on finding the Cid’s daughters almost at the point of death, brings them water in his hat: “new it was and fresh, and he had brought it from Valencia.” Mass is said “at half cock-crow, before the dawn.” The Moor Abengalvon upbraids the treachery of his guests in planning his murder as follows: “Tell me what have I done to you, Counts of Carrión? I serving you without guile, and you took counsel for my death, _Hyo sirviendovos sin art, E vos conseiastes para mi muert_.” Nothing could be more spontaneous and direct. With equal directness honest Pero Bermuez calls one of the Counts of Carrión “a tongue without hands,” “a mouth without truth,” and we read of Asur González, who “would breakfast before he went to prayer,” that “purple he came for he had breakfasted, and reckless was his speech.” The account of the battle is well known: “they clasp their shields before their breasts, they lower their lances with their banners, they bow their faces over the saddles, they went to smite them with bold hearts. With loud voice calls he who was born in happy hour, ‘Strike them, knights, for the love of charity. I am Ruy Diaz, the Cid Campeador of Bibar.’ All strike in the group where is Pero Bermuez. Three hundred lances are there, all with their banners. A Moor apiece they killed at a single blow, and as they turned about they kill as many more. There would you see many lances rise and fall, many a shield pierced and riddled, many a breastplate broken through, many white banners come out red with blood, many good steeds go without a rider. The Moors call on Mahomet, the Christians on St. James. In a short space a thousand and three hundred of the Moors are slain.” No version can give an idea of the vigour of the original. But it is not only battle scenes that are treated forcibly and thrown into high relief. We may take the arrival of the Cid at San Pedro de Cardeña as an example of the amazing vividness given to more quiet episodes: “The cocks are crowing and the dawn is trying to break, when the good Campeador arrived at San Pedro. The Abbot Don Sancho, servant of the Creator, was saying Matins for the return of dawn. And Doña Jimena, with five noble ladies, was praying St. Peter and the Creator: ‘O Thou who guidest all, be with my Cid the Campeador.’ He was calling at the gate and they heard the summons. Heavens! how glad was the Abbot Don Sancho! With lights and with candles they ran into the courtyard. With such joy they receive him who was born in happy hour. ‘I thank God, my Cid,’ said the Abbot Don Sancho, ‘since I see you here, accept my hospitality.’”