A history of Spanish literature - Cristo Raul

INTERMEDIATE VERSE 37
and gentlemen who shared in the Crusades, and whose
jongleurs, mimes, and tumblers came with them.
Explain it as we choose, the influence of France
on Spain is puissant and enduring. One sees it best
when the Spaniard, natural or naturalised, turns crusty.
Roderic of Toledo (himself an archbishop of the Cluny
clique) protests against those Spanish juglares \vho cele-
brate the fictitious victories of Charlemagne in Spain ;
and Alfonso the Learned bears him out by deriding the
songs and fables on these mythic triumphs, since the
Emperor " at most conquered somewhat in Cantabria."
A passage in the Cronica General goes to show that some,
at least, of the early French jongleurs sang to their audi-
ences in French clearly, as it seems, to a select, patrician
circle. And this raises, obviously, a curious question.
It seems natural to admit that in Spain (let us say in
Navarre and Upper Aragon) poems were written by
French trouveres and troubadours in a mixed hybrid
jargon ; and the very greatest of Spanish scholars,
D. Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo, inclines to believe in
their possible existence. There is, in L'Entree en Espagne,
a passage wherein the author declares that, besides the
sham Chronicle of Turpin, his chief authorities are
"dous dons clerges Can-gras et Gauteron,
Can de Navaire et Gaulier d'Arragon."
John of Navarre and Walter of Aragon may be, as
Seftor Menendez y Pelayo suggests, two "worthy clerks"
who once existed in the flesh, or they may be imaginings
of the author's brain. More to the point is the fact that,
unlike the typical chanson de geste, this Entree en Espagne
has two distinct types of rhythm (the Alexandrine and
the twelve-syllable line), as in the Poema del Cid ; and