THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CID.* THE causes which direct a
people's choice of a hero who shall represent to the nation its own idea of what a hero should be, are very obscure. They are certainly not deter- mined by the historical importance of the personage, nor by the far-reaching result of his actions. These characteristics may attach to him or they may not, but they make little difference to his rule in the hearts of the people. Of all such heroes none has had greater sway than had Arthur and Roland, of whom we know scarcely anything. France has since possessed St. Louis and Bayard, but Jeanne d'Are alone can compete in fame with Roland. It has been the same in Spain. Spain had many a hero King, and many a warrior knight during the earlier years of the reconquest, but not one seized on the imagination of the people or became the hero of the nation. Their names were never put forth as the un- approachable ideal, the peerless model of what the champion of Spain should be; this lot fell alone to Rodrigo de Bivar, the Cid Campes.dor.
If we study the life and character of the Cid, without regard
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The Ci4 Cantrwador, affli the Waning of tha Oreatent in the West. By U. Butler Clarke. With Illustration/ from Drawing. by Don Santiaao Arcoe. LOadou 0. P. Patnam's bons. to the race and nation of which he is the type, we are astonished at the choice. Even if we look only at the legendary Cid, the hero of the P oema and of the _Romancer° we may still ask : Could no better figure than this be found on whom to waste all this enthusiasm ? And if we follow the investigation further, and learn from more authentis sources, from Arabic historians as well as from Spanish chroniclers, who the Cid really was, our surprise vastly increases. This greedy freebooter, who fought only for his own hand, loyal to no one but to himself, equally ready to take service under Moslem as under Christian, deceiving all in turn, cruel almost beyond the cruelty of his age, torturing to death his puppets and his tools, harrying the land and carrying off the crops and cattle, killing the peasant and his wife and selling his children into slavery, plundering the citizen and the merchant, employing Jewish and Moorish usurers for his taxgatherers, jealous of his equals,—how did such a one become the hero of a nation P The answer must be sought partly in the political circumstances of the time, partly in the character and temperament of the people. Look at the other popular hero of Spain, the one dramatic type which is the product of her soil, Don Juan Tenoria. Is not the action of Don Juan in the realm of love exactly parallel to that of the Cid in that of war P Or to come down to the present century, were the campaigns of Cabrera and his followers swooping down from Morella,, the Cid's own stronghold, with ruthless ferocity on the country between Saragossa and Valencia, except in the use of firearms, very different from that of the Cid, unless that he won and held Valencia for a time, and they did not ? And as regardo the disloyalty of the Cid, his change of masters whenever it suited his personal ends, this was almost a condition of Spanish life in medimval times ; it was to a great degree sanctioned by the law. There was no one Spain. Now and again a King like Garcia Sancho of Navarre, who was the first to do so in 929, might claim to be King of the Spains, or even Emperor, bat he could not transmit the title, nor make it hereditary. There was no one united Spain till the time of Charles V. Thus a Spaniard might serve in turn Castille, or Navarre, or Aragon, and change his fealty, and yet not feel himself dishonoured. Mr. Clarke has done well to print in an appendix the provision of the Faero Viejo : "How a Vassal may change his Lord." It explains. so much that is otherwise inexplicable in the story of the Cid. The only medieval Spanish Sovereign who revolted against the law, and judged those who acted in accordance with it traitors, was Pedro the Cruel, and it cost him first his throne and then his life.
Thus neither the disloyalty of the Cid nor his cruelty was an insurmountable obstacle to his becoming a popular hero among Spaniards. And, having once adopted him, they pro- ceeded forthwith to clothe him with all kinds of contradictory virtues ; everything that was lovely and of good report became part of his character. Hence we have the beautiful ballad of the leper and the Cid; hence the tales of his courtesy to ladies, and his gentle training of the timid. He becomes model husband and father ; he scorns to take unfair advantage in fight ; he is the pattern of loyalty to King Alfonso; and his good faith is so well established, that even Jewish usurers lend huge sums on the security of his word. This is the Cid of legend, the owner of the good steed, ' Babieca ' and of the two swords ' Tieona' and Colada,' with his two daughters, Dona Elvira and Dais. Sol, and his unworthy sons-in-law. This was the Cid generally accepted, as long as writers con- fined their researches to Spanish and Latin chronicles. But with the revival of Arabic learning, first Conde; then Gayangos, changed all this, and lastly Dozy, more than completing the work of his predecessors, left little for others to glean. History has taken the place of the old romance. Dozy's work lacked one thing only; he had never been in Spain. "Ah ! if Dozy had been in Spain ! " was the exclamation of the Spanish critic who wrote his obituary memoir. This advantage the author of the able and interesting book before us possesses ; he has lived in Spain and with Spaniards, he knows the /and and its peoples. Before completing this history he journeyed with the well-known artist, Don Santiago Arcot', on the track of the Cid, making drawings of the sites, copying the monnmente, and photographing the manuscripts and most of the authentic documents connected with his history. Ouly the maps are inferior to the rest. In the pages which give the result of these researches and explorations the reader will perhaps think it somewhat long before he enters on the memoir of the Cid ; but it is in sketching this background to his hero's life that Mr. Clarke is able to make use of the newest material, and to throw into faller relief the acts and the character of his hero. Strange is the contrast between life in the Courts of the Arab Kings of Southern Spain and life in the camp of the Cid. It is the difference between the ballads of Robin Hood and the quatrains of Omar Khayyam. Excellent is the description of the relations between Al-muta.med, King of Seville, the witty and beautiful Itamid, and the Court poet Ibn-Ammar. No romance can tell of a more complete sur- render to the magic charm of a life of literary and msthetic hedonism, in an atmosphere of sensuous mysticism, with the dark background of fate leading slowly on to a no less stupendous misery. Equally striking is the lovely dirge over Valencia, springing from a hotbed of selfishness and infamy. On the Christian side the narrative is enlivened by translations from the Poema; they are like Macaulay's Lays to the prose history of ancient Rome. If they are not true to actual prosaic fact, yet they tell us what for long centuries people imagined to be the facts, and had all the influence of facts upon their minds. For Spain is the land of survivals, -of remnants of older faiths most strangely mixed with new. 'The very name Cid, Mr. Clarke believes, may point back to an Arabic meaning, like the Roman formula, "Felix, faustus, bonus, fortunatus ; " or, as the Poenza has it, "He who was born in happy hour." So with his belief and trust in augury of birds ; this, too, reminds us of the verse of Silius :—
" Fibrarum et pennm divinarumque sagacem Flammarum misit dives Callmcia pubem."
And centuries after the Cid's day pilgrims to Compostella visited the sacred geese at Barcelona, and consulted the holy -chickens at Santo Domingo de la Calzada. Thus the Cid was not too much above the people ; he shared their prejudices and their superstitions, and for this they forgave the failure of his life, they forgot his faithlessness, his cruelty, and his
greed ; they remembered only his courage and his strength, and fashioned him into a hero out of their own heart. This is the story which our author has narrated as it has not before been done in English, at the same time giving us some glimpses of the brilliant, ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the petty Spanish and Moorish kingdoms which form the history of medimval Spain.
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