Diego Saglia
Spain – bold, ardent, melancholy Spain – the only land in Europe that the children of the East seem to have cared to make their home; – the nurse of romance, after it left its cradle in the Arab desarts
Thus Thomas Roscoe introduces the first of the three volumes of Jennings Landscape Annual dedicated to Spain and published between 1835 and 1838. Although, in previous issues, he “has already conducted his readers to the fairest scenes of France and Italy” [Ibid., p. v], he suggests that the virtual journey to Spain will be an altogether different experience. Accordingly, he delineates the peculiar traits of this country by conjuring up some of the central topoi of Spanishness that make up the composite imagery of Romantic Spain.
Commentators past and present have seen Romantic “inventions” of Spain as a type of cultural construction which, in Javier Noya’s words, typifies Spain as “un pais exotico y orientalizante, mas pre-moderno que decadente” [qtd in ABIADA 2004, p. 58], the other of its neighbouring European countries. In actual fact, this form of cultural construction must be understood as part of a wider process of rediscovery of, and refamiliarization with, Spain, a process that, among other things, promoted a mythologization of the country’s past. In Romantic-period Britain, growing numbers of fascinated travellers, writers, artists and readers saw Spain as the land of chivalry, exalted historical events, a flourishing and lost Muslim civilization and, in literature, the birthplace of romance. In spite of its clichés and limitations, this cultural map of the Iberian country actually made it possible for travellers, writers and artists to “create” Spain for a British public that manifested an increasing interest in this relatively known part of Europe. Roscoe’s reference to “romance” primarily refers to the traditional English literary genre, in prose and verse, that was a staple of Romantic-period literature. As Stuart Curran has observed, if “one of the great scholarly achievements of the Enlightenment [was] the recovery of medieval literature as embodied in its romances” this “revival of romance […] led inevitably to its rewriting”and its transformation into “a central genre of British poetry” between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [CURRAN 1986, p. 129]. However, in the context of Roscoe’s prefatory remarks, the term also seems to hark back to the Spanish ballads, or romances, that had been attracting the attention of European scholars, poets and readers and played a major role in the late-Enlightenment rediscovery of medieval literature.
In Ramon Menéndez Pidal’s overview of the diffusion of the romances in eighteenth-century Europe, Thomas Percy’s inclusion of two instances of these poems in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) influenced Johann Gottfried von Herder, whose Volkslieder (1778) contains a few romances from Ginés Pérez de Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada (1595, 1601) and by Luis de Gòngora. Later Herder went on to publish a composite reworking of Cid-related materials entitled Der Cid nach spanischen Romanzen (1803, 1805). German scholars were particularly active in the re- evaluation and promotion of the Spanish ballads, with such substantial and authoritative contributions as Jakob Grimm’s Silva de romances viejos (1815), G.B. Depping’s Sammlung der besten alten spanischen Romanzen (1817), Friederich Diez’s Altspanische Romanzen (1818, 1821), Johann Niklaus Bohl von Faber’s Floresta de rimas antiguas castellanas (1821- 1825) or B. Pandin’s Spanische Romanzen (1823). In France, Creuz de Lesser published his Romances du Cid (1814) and Abel Hugo his Romancero e historia del rey de Espana don Rodrigo (1821) and Romances historiques(1822) [PIDAL 1953, II, 240-69]. In Spain, Agustìn Duràn’s definitive five-volume Romancero appeared between 1828 and 1832.
Even this briefest of overviews clearly indicates that German scholars made a crucial contribution to the collection and edition of the romances. With these publications they aimed to provide as exhaustive as possible a repertoire of this enormous and as yet untapped store of popular balladry, a task which, according to J.C.L. Simonde de Sismondi, they carried out “with a scrupulous fidelity peculiar to the Germans” [SISMONDI 1846, II, p. 131]. Through Percy’s pioneering translations, British interest in the romances exerted an early and fundamental influence on what soon developed into a widespread European interest in this poetic form. And British antiquarians and hispanophile writers such as Robert Southey and Felicia Hemans soon began to acquire and consult this growing number of Continental editions. Eager to obtain a copy of Depping’s collection, Walter Scott wrote to Southey in a letter of 4 April 1819 to tell him how he came to own one:
Have you seen decidedly the most full and methodized collection of Spanish romances (ballads) published by the industry of Depping (Altenburgh and Leipsic, 1817?) It is quite delighhtful. [George] Ticknor had set me agog to see it, without affording me any hope it could be had in London, when by one of these fortunate chances which have often marked my life, a friend, who had been lately on the Continent, came unexpectedly to inquire for me, and plucked it forth par manière de cadeau. [LOCKHART 1900, III, p. 265]
Yet, unlike their Continental counterparts, British writers and scholars began to translate Spanish romances in a much more irregular and less organized fashion. Southey produced a sizeable number of translations but only published them separately and occasionally in periodicals such as The Morning Post. In addition, Lord Byron and Matthew Gregory Lewis translated a handful of romances as occasional poetical exercises, while Felicia Hemans mostly resorted to the romances as sources for her own “Songs of the Cid” and other recreations of Spanish minstrelsy.
In 1775 Bishop Percy had planned a collection entitled Ancient Songs Chiefly on Moorish Reliques, which however was never published. The only early British collection of romances was Thomas Rodd’s Ancient Ballads from the Civil Wars of Granada (1801, 1803), based on Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada, later followed by his History of Charles the Great and Orlando (1812) containing “the Most Celebrated Ancient Spanish Ballads relating to the Twelve Peers of France”. Particularly, Rodd’s 1801 volume does not feature an introduction and thus makes no attempt at providing background and contextual information for the texts. More comprehensive and paratextually complex publications appeared in the 1820s with John Gibson Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic (1823) and John Bowring’s Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain (1824). Not exclusively concerned with romances but also with other “ancient” poetical forms, the latter work is dedicated to Lord Holland as someone who “in this country first excited and first gratified the public curiosity with respect to the Literature of Spain” [BOWRING 1824, p. iii]. However, as Bowring openly professes his dissatisfaction with contemporary scholarly debate – “the more I read […] the less was I satisfied with the information obtained” [Ibid., p. v] – the volume does not present any extensive introduction on the literary, cultural and historical relevance of early Spanish poetry. The collector and translator merely observes that the special importance of the ballads lies in their status as “truly national” verse [Ibid., p. vi].
By contrast, Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads, Historical and Romantic constitutes a different scholarly and cultural operation, specifically concerned with the romances, their contextualization and interpretation. The translator was the son-in-law and later biographer of Walter Scott, a regular contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine and, from 1825, the editor of the Quarterly Review. Scott himself contributed to the collection with a translation of Los fieros cuerpos revueltos (about the death of King Pedro el cruel) as The death of Don Pedro, and in the prefatory note Lockhart indicates that the ballad “was translated by a friend” and that it is “quoted more than once by Cervantes in Don Quixote” [see PIDAL 1953, II, p. 259]. I ndeed, some of the versions had already appeared in Lockhart’s 1822 edition of Peter Motteux’s translation of Don Quixote published in London by Hurst and Robinson. Yet his first translation of a romance dated further back to the Edinburgh Annual Register for 1816 (published in 1820), while a few more featured in the issues of Blackwood’s Magazine for February and June 1820. When the collection came off the press in 1823, it was an immediate success and had a profound impact on both scholars and the general public. In Erasmo Buceta’s words, it represented “el mas eficaz impulso individual en favor de la popularizacion del Romancero en la Gran Bretana” [BUCETA 1924, p. 502].
In keeping with the adaptative tendencies of poetic translation in verse current between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Lockhart’s versions present a variety of significant interventions on the originals, starting from the transformation of the alliterative lines into regularly rhymed ones [BUCETA 1924, p. 503 and HAYNES 2006, p. 435]. The poems are divided into three sections – “Historical”, “Moorish” and “Romantic” – , with the Moorish section functioning as a transitional body of verse between the more reliably historical compositions and the more romanticized narratives about the last period of the kingdom of Granada. Yet, Lockhart’s collection deserves particular attention for its introductory observations, an extended reflection on the romances and their historical and cultural contexts that clarifies the translator and editor’s position in current scholarly debates, defines the conditions for the reception and assimilation of this type of verse in the British cultural context and promotes a specific construction of Spain and its culture.
Attesting to the scholarly affiliations and the popularizing aims of Lockhart’s work, the introduction positions the volume in an overtly English context: “The intention of this Publication is to furnish the English reader with some notion of that old Spanish minstrelsy, which has been preserved in the different Cancioneros and Romanceros of the sixteenth century” [LOCKHART 1823, p. vii]. This statement then leads to a dismissive judgment on Spanish scholarship: “That great mass of popular poetry has never yet received in its own country the attention to which it is entitled” [Ibid., p. vii]. In Lockhart’s view, the fact that Spanish scholars have not contributed to the labour of collecting their own poetry owes much to the belatedness of Spanish literary taste and a generalized, and reprehensible, lack of interest in early verse: “While hundreds of volumes have been written about authors who were, at best, ingenuous imitators of classical or Italian models, not one, of the least critical merit, has been bestowed upon those older and simpler poets who were contented with the native inspiration of Castilian pride” [Ibid., p. vii]. Consequently, Lockhart observes with no small degree of ‘national’ pride that Spain cannot boast a “Spanish Percy, or Ellis, or Ritson” [Ibid.]. And, a few pages later on, he returns to this issue and exclaims: “Had there been published at London in the reign of our Henry VIII., a vast collection of English ballads about the wars of the Plantagenets, what illustration and annotation would not that collection have received long ere now!” [Ibid., p. xi].
Lockhart’s assessment is undoubtedly too severe, if we consider that, in spite of the dismissive evaluations of the romances by neoclassical scholars and writers, the 1820s saw the beginnings of the re-evaluation of this type of verse in Spain. Between 1820 and 1823, the Valencian printer Agustìn Laborda issued a sizeable number of romances, while Francisco Martìnez de la Rosa defended them as the national poetry of Spain in his neoclassical Poética (1827) [PEERS 1940, I, pp. 157-8]. In addition, Duràn’s project for a comprehensive Romancero, which after its publication supplanted all previous foreign collections and editions, started to take shape in the early 1820s [GIES 1975, p. 19]. Most probably unaware of these developments, Lockhart emphasizes the absence of Spanish contributions and, conversely, stresses the importance of works in German, French and English. Thus, he echoes Friederich Bouterwek’s complaint, in his history of Spanish literature (contained his twelve-volume Geschichte der Poesie und Beredsamkeit, 1801-19), that “no attempt had ever been made even to arrange the old Spanish ballads in any thing like chronological order”[Ibid., pp. vii-viii], and Depping’s attempt at obviating this problem in his Sammlung, which Lockhart declares to be the main source and inspiration for his collection. He also makes frequent references to Robert Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid (1808) and Sismondi’s De la littèrature du midi de l’ Europe, praises James Cavanah Murphy’s architectural study on the Arabian Antiquities of Spain (1815) and inevitably mentions Don Quixote which, as seen above, was closely linked to the inception of his collection.
More specifically, the introduction addresses a whole series of critical issues about the romance as genre and its recovery, starting from the thematic and chronological organization of the ballads, as Lockhart’s regrets that “is therefore, in the present state of things, quite impossible to determine to what period the composition of the oldest Spanish ballads now extant ought to be referred” [LOCKHART 1823, p. viii]. This he imputes to the sixteenth-century editions of romances such as the Cancionero of “Ferdinand de Castillo” [Ibid.] that mixes modern and ancient compositions without providing any clear distinctions; the Cancionero de romances of Antwerp; the Romancero historiado of Lucas Rodrìguez; Lorenzo de Sepùlveda’s Cancionero, and Escobar’s romances of the Cid. Yet, in spite of their perplexing structures, these Renaissance collections cannot disguise the evident antiquity of the ballads. Indeed, Lockhart goes further into detail, describing how the dating of some of the poems in the oldest edition of the Cancionero general seems to be indicated by their ascription to Don Juan Manuel, the author of the Libro de Patronio or Conde Lucanor, with a supposed terminus ante quem of 1362. Nevertheless, the “regularity and completeness of their rhymes alone are in fact quite enough to satisfy any one who is acquainted with the usual style of the redondillas, that the ballads of Don Juan Manuel are among the most modern in the whole collection” [Ibid., p. x]. This disquisition reveals that, unlike Bowring’s, his intended audience is not merely composed of general readers. Lockhart presents his volume as a scholarly work with connections to European scholarship, a work aimed at serious readers who are familiar with Spanish literature (he calls Don Juan Manuel “the celebrated author of Count Lucanor” [Ibid., p. ix]) and the debates about it. In point of fact, his remarks on the antiquity of the romances also contain polemical hints levelled at Southey, an undisputed authority on the Iberian literatures, as he observes that “some of the very expressions from which Mr Southey would seem to infer that the Chronicle of the Cid is a more ancient composition than the General Chronicle of Spain, (which last was written before 1384,) are quite of common occurrence in these same ballads, which Mr Southey considers as of comparatively modern origin” [Ibid., p. xi].
Lockhart’s preoccupation with dates must not be seen as mere pedantry, for, by contrast, it demonstrates his alertness to the fact that the ancient literary tradition of Spain must be accurately reconstructed as a crucial period in European medieval culture, and that the dating of the romances is a staple component in this operation. In addition, it indicates that Ancient Spanish Ballads is not just a book of translations, but rather a complex cultural statement on Spain and the need to reconstruct those overlooked or ignored aspects of its cultural past which even Spanish scholars have left unexamined. Thanks to its introduction, Lockhart’s collection positions itself within the broader context of the Romantic-period accumulation of knowledge on Spain in an accurate and reliable historical perspective, what may be collectively called the Romantic construction of Spain [see SAGLIA 2000].
Lockhart has no doubt that the romances are ancient and intensely national compositions: “that the Spaniards had ballads of the same general character, and on the same subjects, at a very early period of their national history, is quite certain” [Ibid., p. x]. This significant statement marks a turning point in the introduction which then goes on to address the cultural peculiarities of Spain. Indeed, from this point onwards, the introduction becomes a disquisition about Spain as a cultural system that needs to be illustrated and explained. Within this wider agenda, the romances are significant not merely because they provide access to the medieval heritage of Spain, but also because they are crucial for a reconstruction of European medieval civilization, in that “they form by far the oldest, as well as largest, collection of popular poetry, properly so called, that is to be found in the literature of any European nation whatever” [Ibid., p. xi].
Lockhart also discusses the formal aspects of this type of verse, especially its metrical peculiarities in connection with the linguistic features of Spanish. Interestingly, he defines the redondilla as a four-line stanza with assonant even lines, rather than as a quatrain of octosyllabic lines rhyming abba, and reports Jacob Grimm’s suggestion (in his Silva de romances) that “the stanza was composed in reality of two long lines, and that these had subsequently been cut into four” [Ibid., p. xiii]. These formal remarks aside, the emphasis of the introduction is now firmly centred on the distinctive cultural and historical situation of Spain:
How the old Spaniards should have come to be so much more wealthy in this sort of possession than any of their neighbours, it is not very easy to say. They had their taste for warlike song in common with all the other members of the great Gothic family, and they had a fine climate, affording, of course, more leisure for amusement than could have ben enjoyed beneath the rougher sky of the north. The flexibility of their beautiful language, and the extreme simplicity of the versification adopted in their ballads, must, no doubt, have lightened the labour, and may have consequently increased the number of their professional minstrels. [Ibid., pp. xi-xii]
Here Lockhart evidently resorts to all the customary arguments and explanations which, together with the peculiarities of the national character, were usually employed to account for the specific cultural manifestations of the Iberian nation: from proto-ethnographic notions of a common Gothic race and character, to climate and geography or the existence of a class of “professional minstrels” Thus, he presents the ballads as deeply rooted in the geographical and cultural conditions of medieval Spain, a point he reiterates when he remarks that, in the Spanish tradition, historical ballads are more numerous than other types because they represent “the popular poetry of a nation proud, haughty, free, and engaged in continual warfare against enemies of different faith and manners, but not less proud and not less warlike than themselves” [Ibid., p. xiv]. The Oriental components of Spanish medieval history and culture are also of paramount importance. For, although it is impossible to say with any degree of certainty to what extent Spanish language and literature are indebted to Eastern influences, there can be no doubt “that great and remarkable influence was exerted over Spanish thought and feeling – and, therefore, over Spanish language and poetry – by the influx of those Oriental tribes that occupied, for seven long centuries, the fairest provinces of the Peninsula” [Ibid., p. xv].
These remarks prepare the ground for further observations on the Muslim domination and civilization in Spain, its integration of the different cultures and religions and the beginnings of the Christian military resistance and reconquest of the peninsula. Once these topics have been dealt with, the introduction rapidly and slightly unexpectedly swerves to focus on contemporary Spain: “There is, indeed, nothing more natural, at first sight, than to reason in some measure from a nation as it is in our own day, back to what it was a few centuries ago” [Ibid., pp. xviii-xix]. But this transhistorically comparative approach would only produce mistakes in the case of a country such as Spain, because, apart from the peasantry, “the progress of corruption appears to have been not less powerful than rapidﾻ within the fabric of Spanish society “[Ibid., p. xix]. Thus drawing attention to the peculiar situation of Spain in the present, Lockhart calls for a careful examination of the links between contemporaneity and the past in the crucial phases of its historical development.
This shift makes the initial discussion of the literary features of the romances converge into a cultural analysis of Spain, as the values inscribed in the poems are a testament to its past greatness and a patent indication of the current fallen state of the national character. If “the modern Spaniards [are] the most bigoted and enslaved and ignorant of Europeans” [Ibid.], yet only “three centuries back” the situation was radically different, when “Castille, in the first regulation of her constitution, was as free as any nation needs to be, for all the purposes of social security and individual happiness”[Ibid.]. By this indirect reference to such historical, yet also heavily mythologized, phenomena as the cortes and the comuneros of Castile, the essentially Tory Lockhart posits the “liberality of the old Spaniards” [Ibid. p. xxi] as an anticipation of the principles of modern nation-states that might constitute the basis for a renovation of the present-day country.
In this account Spain becomes visible as a geocultural dimension uneasily caught up in the discontinuities between past and present. A country that could boast a medieval ‘constitution’ ensuring social and individual freedom is now in the throes of a troubled process of adjustment to the forces of contemporaneity. In Lockhart’s picture, the ancient principles of ‘liberality’ that seemed to promise a positive cultural and historical development are in stark contrast with the complex evolution of recent Spanish history, from the tragedy of the Napoleonic war to the return of absolutism in 1814 and the ill- fated liberal constitutional monarchy of 1820-23. By contrast, the romances enshrine “the strongest and best proof” of the Spaniards’ original “comparative liberality” [Ibid., p. xxi], and again the presence of the Moors is a crucial test of this original situation:
Throughout the far greater part of those compositions there breathes a certain spirit of charity and humanity towards those Moorish enemies with whom the combats of the national heroes are represented. The Spaniards and Moors lived together in their villages beneath the calmest of skies, and surrounded with the most beautiful of landscapes. In spite of their adverse faiths – in spite of their adverse interests – they had much in common. [Ibid. pp. xxi-ii]
This spirit of peaceful multicultural coexistence additionally translates into forms of intercultural exchange. For, as Lockhart observes, some ballads, “unquestionably of Moorish origin”, were composed “by a Moor or a Spaniard (it is often very difficult to determine by which of the two), they were sung in the village greens of Andalusia in either language, but to the same tunes, and listened to with equal pleasure by man, woman, and child ﾖ Mussulman and Christian” [Ibid. p. xxiii]. In spite of the patent improbability of Andalusian “village greens” Lockhart’s words delineate an idealized image of interracial and intercultural exchanges in spite of profound cultural differences. This picture obviously contrasts with that of a contemporary Spain riven by the divisions between liberals and conservatives inherited from the guerra de la independencia of 1808-14. In addition, it may also apply to the situation of Britain and Ireland, and specifically refer to the resurgence of the Irish question and the campaign for Catholic emancipation which, gathering momentum in the early 1820s, led to the creation of the influential Catholic Association in 1823.
On the one hand, Lockhart reorganizes the principal components of Romantic-period constructions of Spain and its culture, insisting on the reasons for its peculiarity, its distinction from the rest of Europe. Yet, on the other, his introduction does not exclusively promote an ‘othering’ of Spain, because, as seen above, the romances are an integral and essential part of a European cultural dimension made up of different developments. In addition, his account does not aim to ascribe Spain to a distant past, presenting it as a pre-modern society or a country irrevocably destined for decline and decadence. Instead, Lockhart’s investigation of the medieval past of Spain leads to an unexpected examination of its present that ultimately envisages the Iberian nation and its current problems as part of the contemporaneity of Europe and not as an isolated “closed system” relegated to the other side of the Pyrenees [GUILLEN 1998, p. 363].
More than an introduction to a collection of poems, the preface to Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads deserves specific attention for its delineation of a geocultural map of Spain, past and present, and its European relevance. It draws on history, geography, linguistics, anthropo-ethnography and literature to ‘write’ Spain and therefore provide an extremely wide- ranging and homogeneous account with clear ideological and political resonance. Additionally, the cultural orientation of the introduction puts into perspective Lockhart’s opening remarks on Spanish scholarly belatedness and his justification of foreign specialist constructions of this culture. For the overtones of cultural superiority (and cultural imperialism) of his approach fade away, as his analysis of Spain becomes an attempt to define the role and position of this nation in the development of European culture and history.
An important contribution to the rediscovery of Spain and its unique literary heritage, Lockhart’s volume did not go unnoticed. It was mentioned in the Edinburgh Review and was the object of a long and appreciative article in Blackwood’s Magazine for March 1823. Lockhart’s biographer, the Scottish man of letters and translator of French ballads Andrew Lang, later remarked that the collection was “The work which probably made Lockhartﾒs name best and most widely known to the world of readers at that day” [LANG 1897, I, p. 313]. An unquestionable indication of its popularity were William Gifford’s words in a letter to Scott of 13 February 1823: “Some of the translations I have got by heart” [qtd in Ibid., I, p. 319].
An authoritative and reliable source of textual and contextual information on the romances, Lockhart’s volume left numerous traces in later works on Spain. Thus, Thomas Roscoe frequently referred to it in the narratives he wrote for Jennings Landscape Annuals on Granada and Andalusia. In these volumes, he regularly intersperses his accounts of the history and geography of these regions with ballads and other poetic excerpts both in his own translations or drawn from a variety of sources such as Percy, Byron and Lockhart. At the end of the volume on Granada, Roscoe informs the reader that he “regrets that want of space should prevent him giving the noble Ballad on this subject [the seven infantes de Lara], and that on Alonzo d’Aguilar, – the gems of Mr. Lockhart’s Spanish Ballads” [ROSCOE 2007, p. 288]. A few years later, in the second edition of his translation of Sismondi’s De la littèrature du midi de l’Europe (originally published in 1823), Roscoe inserted a series of references to Lockhart’s work, as well as excerpts taken from his translations [SISMONDI 1846, II, pp. 132-3].
Between 1823 and the end of the century, Ancient Spanish Ballads went through several editions, the most outstanding of which was issued by John Murray in 1841. Illustrated from drawings by William Allan, David Roberts, William Simson, Henry Warren, C.E. Aubrey and William Harvey, it featured borders and vignettes drawn by the architect Owen Jones, one of the Victorian authorities on the Alhambra and Moorish architecture and ornamentation.
During his visit to Spain in 1834 with his friend Jules Goury, Jones visited Granada’s royal palace and, fascinated by its complex ornamental schemes, set out to sketch them in painstaking detail. This resulted in the two-volume Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra published between 1842 and 1845, although sections of the book had already gone on sale in 1836. An invaluable study of polychromy in the Muslim tradition, Jones’ was also the first book to contain coloured illustrations produced through the process of chromolithography. More generally, his volume contributed to popularizing further the Moorish architecture of Southern Spain and extending the debate on its history and interpretations. Making the architect an authority on the subject, the book constituted a prelude to his landmark Grammar of Ornament (1856) and earned him the commission to design the Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851 [see FLORES 2006, pp. 15-33].
Produced by Vizetelly of Fleet Street, Murray’s edition of Ancient Spanish Ballads pionereed a unique combination of illustration, decoration and advanced printing techniques. Its real innovations were Jones’ designs for the book cover, title-pages, vignettes and borders. His delicately intricate and beautifully reproduced embellishments “gave unprecedented artistic unity and distinction to the work and established a new direction in book publishing” [Ibid., p. 38]. A luxurious artefact, the volume was marketed as the most beautiful book ever published and proved an immediate commercial success. Over two thousand copies of the first edition were sold in 1841, while the following year a second edition was sold just as quickly [Ibid., p. 36].
However, more generally affordable versions of Lockhart’s work also continued to appear until the end of the century. In 1870 Murray issued a cheaper illustrated edition more in keeping with the current taste in illustrations: Ancient Spanish Ballads; Historical and Romantic “translated by J.G. Lockhart, new edition, with portrait and illustrations” (John Murray, London 1870). Again, in the 1870s, Frederick Warne published a joint edition of Lockhar’s ballads and Southey’s Chronicle of the Cid with the title of The Spanish Ballads “translated by J.G. Lockhart, and The Chronicle of the Cid, by Robert Southey” (Frederick Warne, London 1873?). The book appeared in the “Chandos Classics” series, and the preface to the ballads appropriately announced that “The Publishers, in uniting with them Southey’s fine translation of the ‘Chronicle of the Cid’, believe that they are adding to the value and interest of these charming Ballads by presenting at the same time a perfect picture of the Spanish mind at the most striking and interesting period of national history” [LOCKHART 1873?, p. v]
The fortunes of Lockhart’s collection in the later nineteenth century testify to its authoritativeness and its uninterrupted popularization of the Spanish romances among British readers. On the one hand, it offered a rich and homogeneous selection of Spanish ballads in line with other contemporary collections produced in Germany and France. In this fashion, it gave English-language readers access to a ballad corpus “unsurpassed in Europe for their number, vigour, influence, dramatic intensity, and veracity” [ENTWISTLE 1939, p. 152]. On the other hand, its introduction offered what has recently been defined as an example of “an antiquarian approach to popular culture, in line with Walter Scott’s work on Scottish border ballads” [PYM and STYLE 2006, pp. 263-4]. More specifically, Lockhart’s prefatory remarks provided readers with an interpretation of Spain as a multifaceted cultural complex, and an interpretation of this country’s civilization that bridged the gap between the Middle Ages and the early 1820s. By expanding its focus from the romances to a wider panorama of geocultural issues, the introduction presents a picture of Spain and its relations with other European traditions that makes Lockhart’s Ancient Spanish Ballads an exemplary instance of the wide-ranging process of cultural construction of the Iberian nation in Romantic-period Britain.
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