Count Lucanor | Page 2

ancient Spanish nobles, whose pride of lineage, whose fierce courage, and chivalrous sentiment are traditional. These characteristics, however, he shared with many others of his time, and they would hardly have served to make his name remembered. The distinguishing and exceptional fact that causes it to stand out conspicuous from the rest, is his authorship. His victories and defeats, his royal relationship and descent are nothing to us now; while the very thing upon which he probably prided himself least, or looked upon as at best an idle solace from graver toils -- the collection of stories which he penned in the rare intervals of leisure between the labours of the camp and the council, and which he bequeathed in manuscript to the monks of Pe?��afiel -- still lives to be read, and to afford instruction and entertainment to a generation that follows the arts of peace as nobler than the arts of war.
El Conde Lucanor first found its way into print in 1575, when it was published at Seville, under the auspices of Argote de Molina, whose elaborate genealogy of the author would delight a heraldic mind. It was again printed, at Madrid, in 1642,* after which time, in the general neglect all over Europe of early literature, it lay forgotten for nearly two centuries.
An incomplete edition, with modernized spelling, was published at Stuttgart, in 1839, and reprinted at Paris in 1840. An edition was also published at Barcelona in 1853. But the first critical edition presenting a standard text, founded on an elaborate collation of the earlier editions and of the existing manuscripts, appeared only seven years ago (Madrid, 1860), under the superintendence of Don Pascual de Gayangos. In this edition the missing chapter, the absence of which renders the two early ones incomplete, was supplied from a manuscript in the National Library at Madrid.
It is indeed time that such a book, so full of the antique simplicity and wisdom, should be appreciated. The artless na?��vet?? of these tales ought to delight an age surfeited with the sensational novels that pour from our circulating libraries in an uninterrupted stream. Of analysis of character, viii indeed, about which so much cry is made now-a-days, there is little. It was an age when men were not always probing their moral sensations and analysing their own minds with a morbid self-consciousness. It was a robust, healthy age, little given to fret itself with metaphysical or fine-spun distinctions; an age of muscular activity, not over prone to much speculation, and what there was of abstract thought was so clear and transparent that he who runs may read.
And so, though every tale in the collection illustrates some wise moral and closes with some pithy maxim for the conduct of life, there is no dogmatic teaching. Every reader could apply the tale in his own way, and adapt the moral to the peculiar circumstances of his own condition. And, independently of any moral, each story is a real story, artistic and interesting -- nay, true in the best sense of the word, true to nature and the human heart.
The book is further a picture of the time. Any one who wishes to have a living representation of the Spanish chivalry of the fourteenth century, of the life and manners of that picturesque epoch, of the blunt nobleness and rude valour of which the Cid is still cherished in Spain as a type -- will find it here, if anywhere.
What shall we say as to the literary merit of the book? Written more than a century before the invention of printing, long before modern writing became a practice and an art -- at a time when the few ix scholars who wrote used Latin as the only fitting and permanent vehicle of their thoughts -- it has, doubtless, what we at this day may call faults of style, with occasional needless and somewhat wearisome repetitions; these the translator found it difficult to abridge without interfering with the characteristic features of the original, as regards quaintness and clearness of detail -- two qualities which constitute the charm of the book, and are essential to the force and point of able literature.
Like our Chaucer, Don Juan Manuel has a high claim to the reverence of his countrymen as one of the first who consolidated their language, and discarding 'canine-latin' (Ciceronian having become impossible), gave tot eh Castilian dialect a permanence and importance, at the same time improving and enlarging its capabilities of expression.
From the Arabic phrases which we find scattered through the book, it may safely be assumed that Don Manuel had, during his long intercourse with the Moors, become tolerably proficient in that language. This inference lends probability to the idea that some of the Eastern collections of tales were not unknown to him, and that