VII
THE DESCENT OF BALLADS
E
PICAL ballads have, for more than a century, aroused an
interest greater than their intrinsic worth, since they seemed
to offer a clue to the rise of the great traditional epics. The ballads
and epics which treat of the Cid Campeador have the same hero,
subject, and incidents; they are both forms of traditional literature,
expressed in not dissimilar language and metre; and it is natural
to suppose that the simpler form will have come before the more
complex. The ballad has been described as logically5 the most
primitive form of poetry. On such a supposition Bouterweck1
opened his account of Spanish literature with the hypothesis that
The poetic spirit . . . was doubtless first manifested in romances
and popular songs'. The hypothesis was most attractive where
ballads were not extant, either because it seemed a providential
clue to a lost antiquity, or simply that scholarly ingenuity was not,
in such a case, cramped by too accurate a knowledge of facts. To
surprise the secrets of the Iliad and Odyssey y tracing their origins
in a "sequel of songs and rhapsodies', loose songs not collected
together in the form of an epic poem until about 500 years after',2
was a thrilling achievement; and it was followed by the discovery
of the "twenty popular ballads, originally handed down orally, but
written down about 1190 or 1200', which Lachmann had dis-
cerned in the Nibelungenlied, and the 'cantilfaies' which Gaston
Paris and Leon Gautier saw at the roots of the Chanson de Roland.
The Greek klephtic 'tragoudia* served to demonstrate the fact of
ballad literature in Greek, and the Akritic epos had not yet
emerged to show how ambiguous such evidence might be. For at
least three-quarters of a century epic criticism was dominated by
the hypothesis of ballad priority.
This hypothesis was formally disproved for Spain by Mild y
Fontanals,3 who showed that in every case the Spanish 'romances'
are much younger than the corresponding 'cantares de gesta'. Pio
Rajna soon after commenced his hunt for Merovingian epics, as
l F, Bouterweck, History of Spanish Literature (trans. Thomasina Ross)
London, 1842, p. 17.
*'Homer', Encyclopaedia Britannica, nth ed. (quoting Bentley, and Wolfs
Prolegomena ad Homerum, 1795). See further 'Nibelungenlied'.
3 M. Mild y Fontanals, De la Poesia heroico-popular en Espana> 1874.