17o	ROMANCE BALLADS
revised epic (prosified by the chroniclers of 1344). They also con-
tain what may be an actual historical date from the lives of the
'infantes5; the day on which the Castilian invasion became known
to Almansur at Cordoba. The Moor Alicante rides into the capital
with the heads of the seven 'infantes' and their tutor in a kerchief.
Almanzor, according to the epics and ballads, took the cloth to the
prison and left it to be unrolled by their father Gonzalo Gustos.
The old man's grief was terrible. One by one he took up the heads
and lamented for his sons, remembering incidents of their young
manhood. These references are more precise in the epos as
recorded by the chroniclers than in the ballad. The epical style is
circumstantial and leisurely; the ballad style summary and
dramatic. The distance between the chronicler's text of the
'denouement' and the last of the ballads (26) is much greater. As
it now stands, this piece has omitted everything but the words
spoken when Mudarrillo surprised his enemy Ruy Velazquez. Two
great poets have traversed the same ground and have been worsted
by the anonymous minstrel (or by his effort as sublimated by
tradition). Lope de Vega, in his Bastardo Mudarra, has avoided too
close a contact; his treatment is romanesque and torpid, and the
ballad-poet proves to have been more dramatic than the dramatist,
more tragic than the tragedian. Victor Hugo's Don Rodrigue est a
la Chasse (Orientales 30) is a bit of Asiatic rhetoric, not devoid of
absurdity due to mislaid 'local colour3. Where two such poets have
failed, it is not likely that any rendering will succeed; but the
following may convey some notion of the words, form, and dramatic
intensity of the original:
Gone a-hunting is Rodrigo,
and of Lara is his name,
in the heaviness of midday
underneath a beech-tree laid,
heaping curses on Mudarra,
son unto the Renegade—
that his soul (could he but seize Mm)
from his body would he tear.
Thus that lord so fiercely muttering,
Mudarrillo doth appear.
' Gentle sir, may God be with you
underneath the beech-tree laid.*
'Welcome are you here, good squire,
unto you I wish the same.*