SPAIN
195
SPAIN
(Iiifod Iiy combining the present indicative of haheo
with tlic pust participio of the verli in question {nmii
from (iinan, " 1 Invcd": he niiinrli} from hahio anmlum,
"1 have lovefl").
'Ihe future perfect
has coal(>sceii with
the i)resent perfect
of the subjunctive
to form the future
(or hypothetical)
subjunctive, which
tense, however, is
now httle used in
spoken language.
Of the Latin imperative (inly the second singular and plural present have remained {nma, bat. ama; amad, Lat. amate), and these are of restricted service: their place is generally taken in polite usage by forms derived from the present subjunctive. To go with these ' latter there has been devised a new pronoun of ceremonious import, usied, ustcdes (from vuestra mcrced, "Your Grace", etc.), which is frequently abridged to \'d., Vds. or F.,V'F. It may be said once for all that all the perfect tenses of the indicative and subjunctive both are made up of the recjuisite form of the auxiliary haber and the past participle of the principal verb. Of the Latin subjunctive tenses the present remains; the imperfect has vanished wholly; the pluperfect has become an imperfect in force {amasc, "1 should love", from amai'issem, amaxscm) ; the perfect has been spoken of. A second subjimctive imjierfect largely interchangeable in use ^\-ith the other is one derived from the Latin pluperfect indicative (nmara, "1 should love", Lat. amnveram, amaram). This still has occasionally its original pluperfect (or even preterite) indicative force. Of the Latin non-finite forms, the infinitive, the gerund (with uninflected present parti- cipial use) and the past participle (originally jiassive, but in Spanish also active) alone 6ur\-ive. In the per- fect tenses which it forms the past participle is in- variable: when employed adjectively it agrees with the word to which it refers in both gender and number. The Latin present participle (in am, antem, etc.) has become a mere adjective in Spanish.
A further peculiarity of Spanish is its possession of two verbs "to have ",/cHcr and hnhcr, of which the lat- ter can appear only as the auxiliary of ])crf cct tenses or as the impersonal verb (hay, "there is", "there are", AaM<i,"therewas","therewere", etc.) andof two verbs "to be", scr and exiar, which are likewise kept apart in their uses {.tcr indicates permanency an<l cxiar only transiency when they predicate a quality; e.s(ar alone can be employed where physical situat ion is concerned ; etc.). A striking syntactical fact in Spanish is the employment of the preposition, d "to", or "at", be- fore the noun (or an>' pronoun excejjt the conjunctive personal pronoun) denoting a definite personal object (veo al homhre, "I see the man"). The word-order is rather lax as compared with that existing in the sister- languages.
LiTERATfRE. — As has been stated above, Spanish literature properly so-called began in the twelfth cen- tury. Of course Latin documents written in Spain and running through the Middle Ages from the fifth centurj' on show, here and there, words which are obviously no longer Latin and have assumed a Spanish .aspect, but these charters, deeds of gift, and like documents have no literary value. None at- taches either to the hnguistically interesting Old
Spanish glosses of the eleventh centurj-, once preserved
in the Mona.stery of Santo Domingo de Silos at Burgos,
and now at the British Museum in London. But in
the epic "Poema del Cid" and in the dramatic "Auto
de los reyes magos" of (he twelfth century' we find
Spani.sh appropriated to the purjioses of real literature.
It is not absolutely certain which of these two compo-
sitions antedates the other; each is preserved in but a
single MS. and in each case the MS. is defective. The
little aido, or play, of "The Magian Kings" seems
to have been based on an earlier litm-gical Latin play
WTitten in France, and is certainly not the work of an
apprentice hand, for in diction and versification it
shows no little skill on the part of him who wrote it.
In dramatic technic it marks an improvement upon
the methods discernible in the group of Franco-Latin
plays to which it is related. It deals of course with
the" visit of the Three Wise Men to the stable of the
Child Jesus at Bethlehem, but the MS. breaks off at
the point where they quit Herod. Thus in Spain, as
in ancient Greece and as in the other lands of Modern
Europe, the drama, in its inception, has close afhUa-
tions with religious worship. Curiously enough, we
have no further absolutely certain records of a WTitten
Spanish play until the fifteenth centurj'. We are cer-
tain, nevertheless, that plays were constantly acted in
Spanish during this long interval, for the law-books
speak of the presence of actors on the soil and brand
some of them, especially those ijroducing juegos de
escnrnio (a kind of farce), as infamous.
All the evidence tends to place the d.ate of composi- tion of the "Poema del Cid" (also called "Gesta de Myo Cid" or "Cant ares de Myo Cid") at about the middle of the twelfth century. The fourteenth-cen- tury MS. containing it is in a deplorably garbled con- dition, having folios missing here and there and show- ing lines of very uneven length as well as assonating rhymes frequently imperfect. The chances are that it was WTitten at first in regularly framed assonance verses of fourteen to sixteen syllables — each breaking normally into half-lines of seven to eight syllables, such as now form the usual romance or ballad line — and that these verses constituted stanzas or laisses of irregvdar length, such as we find in the Old French "Chanson de Ro- land" and other chfinsotis de geste. The hero celebrat- ed in the poem was the doughty war- rior Rodrigo (Ruy) Diaz de Bi\ar, who died in 1099 and whom the Arabs styled C«!/— ".Mv Lord". He had been exiled f n mi his native Castile and, after serving now this and now that Moorish king- ling in his wars against his neigh- bours, Rodrigo had been able to take Valencia from the infidels and estab- lish him.self there as an independent nder. In the .3700 and more lines of the " Poema" although the his- torical element is large, the figure of the Cid is highly idealized; he is no longer fr.ictious with respect to his monarch, .-Vlfonso of Castile, as history shows him to have been, and when he has achieved independence he still avouches himself an adherent of that monarch. A great deal is m.ade in the " Poema" of certain unhis- torical marriages of (he Cid's flaughters to fictitious Infantes of Carrion, who desert their brides but are
AcrsTfx MoRETo Y Cab.\
