SPAIN, SPANISH JEWRY, PORTUGAL, IBERO-AMERICA 187
his plays show that he had lost sight of one essential element: the
narrative value of the 'romance'. There was general decadence in
all the types of Spanish literature, and when the eighteenth century
opened, the ballads had been divorced from good taste. They had
become plebeian in subject and style (romances vulgares). Though
the one quite successful lyric of the age was an attempt to retell an
episode from the life of the Cid, the measure employed by Nicolas
Fernandez de Moratin was not the ballad measure. They came
back to favour with the Romantic movement of the early nine-
teenth century, and were gathered into the vast Romancero of
Agustin Duran. In this form, however, there was little distinction
between good and bad, and the 'strengthless heads* of late and
artificial ballads were found pell-mell among those which spoke
'winged words'. The Romantics, furthermore, were digesting
all their past national traditions simultaneously. Rivas's Moro
Exposito (1834) owes more to dramas of the decadence than to the
fine cycle of the Infantes de Lara. His epos illustrates also the
Romantic preoccupation with £local colour'. It is this concern
chiefly which prevents the 'leyendas' of Rivas and Zorrilla from
being true ballads. They self-consciously attempt to produce an
atmosphere, which the veracious ballad-poets took for granted.
Both artistic and vulgar ballads continue to appear in our own
time. The lamented Garcia Lorca aimed at bringing back to the
Spanish Parnassus not only their traditional style, but also their
music, restoring to poetry once again its old outer clothing of
melody. Other modems, such as Don Salvador de Madariaga,
have used the ballad metre for their own purposes. On the other
hand, the deaths of bullfighters, tragedies, and (in countries of
Spanish speech, when they exist) bandits, are deemed subjects
profitable to be sung round the streets of Madrid and other cities
by blind beggars, for whom a tribe of beggarly rhymesters works.
The civil war has already produced its Romancero, though of little
merit. Humble as most of the vulgar ballads are, there are some
not devoid of wit or vigour. The eighteenth-century Miller of
Arcos suggested to Pedro Antonio de Alarcon his Sombrero de tres
Picos ('three-cornered hat'), which Russian dancers have carried to
most parts of Europe.
The old historical ballads treated of civil wars in the Guadal-
quivir valley or frontier skirmishes on the Granadine border: they
were thus specifically Andalusian The epic themes belonged