154 ROMANCE BALLADS

This Is not the first state of a ballad. The 'romances' must have
been lengthy pieces like the extant Count Alarcos and Count Dirlos,
but the needs of the concert chamber in the sixteenth century have
caused many to be cut short, and discretion has pruned away from
the best of them every detail that could be spared. The characters
are left to act out their own drama, and so the impression of
veracity is heightened. The dominant impression is one of strict
historicity: such and such things did happen because they actually
are taking place before the eyes of the public. They did happen,
also, because a vast mass of Spanish ballads refer to historical per-
sons and events, and because they do so in the most factual manner
possible. The supernatural and the marvellous are almost wholly
absent from Spanish balladry. It seemed to Southey, who was a
good judge, that this is a defect of the 'rornancero' which sets it
beneath the ballads of our own land. The 'romances' are inferior
in the fruits of the imagination which broods on things that are not;
they offer no escape from life, either as a source of horror or relief;
but their stark humanity powerfully stirs the human in us.
eMentem mortalia tangunt.'

The form of the 'romance' being precisely defined, it follows
that there are many topics excluded from the 'romancero' which
we have to notice in dealing with the ballads of other countries.
At least two lyrical moulds were formed in the earlier Middle
Ages, serving for the domestic occasions and typical encounters
which bulk largely wherever the ballad is half lyrical. The older
of these was the 'cossante';1 it was at home in Galicia, whence it
extended into Portugal, and its prestige was such that Castilians
also composed courtly verses in the Galician dialect. The 'cos-
santes* were in distichs with refrain (generally very brief). Their
chief aesthetic feature was their immobility; that is to say, lack of
• either narrative or psychological development. For the space of
two, three, or four distichs the poet simply repeated the same
situation, the same emotion of longing, anticipation, joy, desola-
tion, restlessness. The clauses naturally tended to run parallel,
with little more change than required by the assonance. In some

1 There are many accounts of this poetical form, the most attractive being
that of A. F. G. Bell, Portuguese Literature, Oxford, 1922, pp. 22-35. A sufficient
number of examples can be found in the Oxford Book of Portuguese Verse. In
'From^cantigas de amigo" to "cantigas de amor" \RevuedeLitteratureComparee,
xviii, 1938, pp. 137-52, I attempted to amend the definition given of this kind
of poetry, and to show how it affected subsequent lyrics in the Provencal style.