APPENDIX

§ 1 Literature of the People

Side by side with literature proper there has always existed in Portugal a literature of the people. Indeed, before Portuguese poetry was written it flourished on the lips of the people, in the songs of the women. Sometimes this popular literature almost coalesced with written literature, as in the case of the cossantes in the thirteenth century. Its poetry lent a glow and magic to the work of Gil Vicente and later to some of the lyrics of Camões; its proverbial lore was reproduced in Jorge Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ prose plays and later by D. Francisco Manuel de Mello; in indigenous folk-tales Trancoso found part of his material. Eighteenth-century writers neglected it, but Filinto Elysio returned to popular sources, and in the nineteenth century they inspired two great poets, Almeida Garrett and João de Deus. Literature and illiteracy have often gone hand in hand. In Ferreira de Vasconcellos’ Eufrosina (Act III, sc. ii) we read of the workwoman (lavrandeira) who ‘sings de solao, composes songs, loves to learn trovas by heart, gives a schoolboy farthings to buy cherries in return for reading autos to her’; and the Pratica de Tres Pastores gives us a picture of an old peasant reading out from the Bible[700] of an evening to the whole village:

The popular appetite for autos, simple Christmas plays, legends of saints, and for long vague romances never flagged, and some of the literature written to satisfy it, by Balthasar Diaz and others, is reprinted and hawked about the country in folhas volantes at the present day, as Diaz’ Historia da Imperatriz Porcina (Porto, 1906)—a romance of some 1,500 octosyllables in -ía—and his Tragedia do Marques de Mantua. The prose Verdadeira Historia do Imperador Carlos Magno (Porto, 1906) is the last descendant of Nicolas Piamonte’s Spanish translation (from the French original) Carlomagno, printed at Seville in 1525 and at Alcalá in 1570, or rather of Jeronimo Moreira de Carvalho’s Portuguese version (2 pts., 1728, 37). It is an instance of the Portuguese delight in strange, even fantastic, but in any case foreign, themes. The Verdadeira Historia da Donzella Theodora (Porto, 1911), daughter of a merchant of Babylon, was introduced from the East and was translated by Carlos Ferreira from the Spanish (1524) and published at Lisbon in 1735. The Verdadeira Historia do Grande Roberto Duque de Normandia e Imperador de Roma (Porto, 1912) is a belated echo of the French story of Robert le Diable, which also came to Portugal through Spain (Burgos, 1509). The Verdadeira Historia da Princeza Magalona (Porto, 1912) has a similar derivation from France (14th or 15th c.) through Spain (Sevilla, 1519), and retains its popularity as a record of unswerving constancy na fe e na virtude. The Verdadeira Historia de João de Calais, reprinted at Oporto in 1914, is also undisguisedly foreign. The story of Flores e Branca Fror, last offshoot (a ‘vile extract’ Menéndez y Pelayo called it) of the charming Greek tale which came originally from the East,[701] was mentioned by several poets (King Dinis, Joan de Guilhade, the Archpriest of Hita) in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries[702] and in the Gran Conquista de Ultramar (13th c.), and was condemned by Luis Vives. The prose story copied by Boccaccio in his Filocolo is still popular in Portugal and Galicia. There is an edition printed at Oporto in 1912: Historia de Flores e Branca-Flor, seus amores e perigos que passaram por Flores ser mouro e Branca-Flor christã. García Ferreiro refers to a historia de Branca Fror as recited at a Galician escasula.[703] Most of these popular threepenny leaflets are very quaintly illustrated on the title-page. The woodcut on the 1912 edition of Flores e Branca-Flor is worth many an epic.[704] The portrait of Robert le Diable (1912 ed.) represents no less a person than Napoleon III, and the ‘true likeness of the beautiful Princess Magalona’[705] (1912 ed.) is Queen Alexandra. These folhas volantes of the literatura de cordel with many farsas, such as Manoel Mendes by Antonio Xavier Ferreira de Azevedo (1784-1814), reprinted at Oporto in 1878, and various progeny of the ingenious Bertoldo, as Astucias de Mengoto, Industrias de Malandrino (both Porto, 1879), Astucias de Zanguizarra (Porto, 1878), Vida de Cacasseno (Porto, 1904), contain little of the real people and less of literature. More indigenous, but still attracting by virtue of its foreign episodes, is the Auto, Livro (1554?), Historia or Tratado do Infante D. Pedro que andou as quatro (sete) partidas do mundo, which is attributed to Gomez de Santo Estevam, one of the prince’s attendants in his long travels, and of which the first known edition (1547) is in Spanish. It has been constantly reprinted and, with romances of chivalry, formed the education of the notary in O Hyssope.[706] Nor do the Trovas do Bandarra belong to literature, although these verses of the cobbler prophet of Trancoso, Gonçalo Annez Bandarra (†1556?), which caused him to figure in one of the earliest trials before the Inquisition (1541) and were subsequently interpreted as referring to the return of King Sebastian, exercised the fancy of the people and even the wits of the educated for some three centuries. Forbidden in Portugal, they were printed abroad, probably at Paris in 1603, at Nantes in 1644, Barcelona 1809, London 1810 and 1815. It was not until 1852 (Porto) that an Explicação of them could be published in Portugal. Their interest was then much diminished, since the thirty scissors of the verse,

had been thought to signify the year 1808, i.e. thirty closed scissors = 30 × 8: 240 years after King Sebastian began to reign (1568). A more reasonable computation would have been from Alcacer Kebir (de vos ha de hir) = 1818, or, if the scissors were open: ✂ (10), = 1878. Many sought to connect with Bandarra’s prophecies the sayings of Simão Gomez (1516-76), the ‘Holy Cobbler’, and his biography, written by the Jesuit Manuel da Veiga (1567-1647), Tratado da Vida, Virtudes e Doutrina Admiravel de Simão Gomes, vulgarmente chamado o Çapateiro Santo (1625), a book in more than one respect singular and charming, was burnt by the public hangman at Lisbon in 1768 in ‘Black Horse Square’. The 1759 edition had received the ordinary licenças. But farther afield, deeper in the heart of the people and far more ancient, exists another literature. Writers who have gone to this source have never come away unrewarded. Their work has gained a freshness and a charm[707] which the most successful disciples of imported learning and latinity have in vain attempted to rival, and gives the reader the impression that if he is not plucking the bough of gold he is not far from the tree on which it grows. And the reason is, perhaps, that the Portuguese people still retains an element pre-Christian, even pre-Roman, an element which goes back to solar myths and pagan beliefs, and about which hangs a primaeval mystery and wonder, a glamour and enchantment born of direct contact with the forces of Nature, and the worship, fear, and propitiation of many unseen powers and divinities. A great part of the people still inhabits a region of fiery dragons and apples of gold, and with ready imagination peoples streams and woods, sea and air with spirits. December and June are connected with the birth and supremacy of the sun’s power, and paganism, thinly disguised, survives in several of the ceremonies of the Christian Church, and serves to increase the Church’s hold on the minds of the people. Both the songs and the dancing with which it was accompanied were no doubt originally religious. The movements of the dance seem to have influenced the song, so that its metre was divided by real feet. When the Archbishop of Braga, Frei Bartholomeu dos Martyres, was visiting his diocese in the sixteenth century he was met by Minhoto peasants with danças e folias and with cantigas que entoavam entre as voltas e saltos dos bailes,[708] songs evidently similar to those in the works of Gil Vicente, with leixapren and refrain (aaxbbx[709] or abxbcx).[710] The volta would correspond in action to the leixapren[711] of the song, the salto to the refrain. The origin of the refrain was perhaps the pause (preceded by a final leap into the air) made by the breathless dancers, as in the words no penedo of this version of ‘The House that Jack Built’: Quaes foram os perros que mataram os lobos que comeram as cabras que roeram o bacello que posera João preto no penedo.[712] The phrase ver cantar, ‘to see these songs sung’, might be defended.[713]

In modern times the refrain has not been entirely lost, it occurs occasionally, e.g. Valhame Deus, or Valhame Deus e a Virgem Maria, but the usual song is a refrainless quatrain rhyming in the second and fourth lines, perhaps originally a distich broken up into four lines like the sixteen-syllable lines of the old romances, and from which the refrain has disappeared. It is essentially a love song: instead of the song of the people, sung to the tread of dancing feet, the song of the love-lorn individual, sung to the strumming of his guitar or of the professional cantadeira at a rustic pilgrimage. But they are also sung by the people generally, often by women[714] who can neither read nor write but have a large stock of these cantigas, which, indeed, are almost innumerable. They may be read in their thousands in Antonio Thomaz Pires’ Cantos Populares Portuguezes (4 vols., Elvas, 1902-10), Dr. Theophilo Braga’s Cancioneiro Popular Portuguez (2 vols., Lisboa, 1911, 1913), Snr. Jaime Cortesão’s Cancioneiro Popular (Porto, 1914), and in other collections, and hundreds of thousands die uncollected and unknown. Although it is perhaps a pity that all the popular poetical talent should tend to adapt itself to one mould—the quatrain—their brevity is excellent in that it imposes concision. Their thought has to be expressed in some twenty words, although they are rarely epigrammatic in the sense of the modern epigram. Some are geographical, or local, in praise of some town or village, river or fountain. Many are religious, that is, they combine love and religion in honour of the Lady of the Hills, the Star, the Snows, the Rosary, the Sands, Pity, Affliction, Health, Hope, or in honour of saints, and especially of the three popular saints of June: St. Anthony, St. John, and St. Peter. Others are devoted to special festivals: Christmas (Natal), the New Year (Anno Bom), the Epiphany (Os Reis), the Resurrection.[715] The majority are concerned with Nature, either generally or in detail. Sometimes they are frankly pantheistic, more often they content themselves with singing the praises of a favourite flower, rosemary, myrtle, the rose, and especially the carnation—the red cravos which glow in doorway or window-ledge of countless houses and cottages in June. Among the birds the swallow,[716] ‘the bird of the Lord’, as the peasants call it, is rare—perhaps its rhyme is disdained as too easy—the parrot, the dove, and the nightingale are far commoner. Numerous cantigas are concerned with the sea, fewer with the sun, the stars, superstitions, witches, sirens; many with dancing and various occupations—the herdsman (ganadeiro), yokel (ganhão), shepherd (pastor), harvesters (ceifeiros, ratinhos, malteses, mondadeiras). But of course the principal subject is love, jealousy, separation, constancy, saudade, satire. The occasional presence of a French word, e.g. négligé or cache-nez, is not necessarily a proof that the cantiga in question is not of popular origin, but merely that it is urban. Of many cantigas the first line consists simply of a long-drawn Ailé (αἴλινον, αἴλινον εἰπέ, τὸ δ’ εὖ νικάτω) or Ai lari lari lolé (where the fanatic of Basque can find il (= dead) as easily as in the refrain of C. V. 415), so that they really consist of three lines, the ailé being introductory.

Some of the quatrains rise to real poetical beauty, and most of them are charmingly spontaneous, forming in their unpremeditated art the natural song-book of a nation of poets. The number in print already approaches fifty thousand. In the mass they perhaps produce a monotonous effect, being mostly of the one pattern, despite the variety of their contents:

A few links in these modern cantigas carry us back to the songs in Gil Vicente’s plays and beyond: a dialogue between mother and daughter, a reference to dancing de terreiro, balho, dance and song, to the casada, mas mal casada, or i-a sequence, as Filho da Virgem Maria (Sagrada). Other links in the popular literature throughout the ages are the riddles (adivinhas) at which Gil Vicente’s shepherds played in the Auto Pastoril Castelhano (the example given in João de Barros’ Grammatica (1540) is:

—the father is still unborn and the son is on the roof: a fire and its smoke; modern instances are printed in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s Cancioneiro Popular Portuguez, vol. i (1913), pp. 363-70); the lullabies (cf. the modern Ró ró, meu menino, Dorme e descansa, Tu es meu alivio E a minha esperança with Gil Vicente’s Ro, ro, ro, Nuestro Dios y Redentor, No lloreis, &c., i. 57); the cantigas de Anno Bom; the ‘pagan janeiras’, as Filinto Elysio called them; the cantigas dos Reis, the alvoradas, the maios. The alva or alvorada should properly contain the word alva in the refrain, as in C. V. 172, or Guiraut de Bornelh’s

(For day is near, and high in the East appears the star that brings in the day: I know it well, and soon it will be dawn.) The theme is the parting of lovers at dawn:

A Catalan alba-cossante is given in Milá y Fontanals’ Romancerillo Catalán[720]:

An example of a Galician mayo, that is, a song introducing the Mayo or May-boy (corresponding to our Queen of the May), is given in Milá’s article in vol. vi of Romania. It closely resembles that of Gil Vicente (Este é o Mayo, o Mayo é este) in the Auto da Lusitania:

It then breaks into a muiñeira (in Castilian):

To the janeiras more than one classical author alludes. Mello (Epan. i) thus notices them at Evora on New Year’s Eve, 1638, before the house in which the Conde de Linhares was lodged: a fim de se lhe cantarem certas Bençoens & Rogatiuas (costume de nossos anciãos que com nome de Janeiras entoavam placidamente pelas portas dos mais caros amigos) se congregou grande numero de pouo.[721] Some romances (also xacara, xacra, and in the Azores arabia) have been printed direct from the lips of the people by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos in his Romanceiro Portuguez (1886). The degenerate, more modern, and subjective form of the romance is the fado, a ballad (melancholy as the old solao[722]), composed by the professional fadistas of the towns. The fado is even more modern than the modinha (end of eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century). It dates from the first third of the nineteenth century, and has not even now penetrated to the south, being indeed largely a Lisbon product. It may be composed in verses of four (quadras), five (quintilhas), or ten (decimas) lines.

The individual in the favourite quadras expresses his personal sorrow and his love; the immemorial lore of the Portuguese people as a whole survives less in them than in the no less numerous proverbs—um bosque de muitas e varias maneiras de adagios. There is scarcely a Portuguese writer whose works do not furnish a goodly crop of these proverbs, often in evidently popular form, sometimes betraying their Spanish origin in the rhyme. They have been collected in Antonio Delicado’s Adagios Portugueses (1651), in Adagios (1841), Philosophia Proverbial (1882), and elsewhere. The language is full of proverbial phrases, and most Portuguese could at will conceal their meaning from a foreigner in a maze of idiomatic expressions. The variety of their names is sufficient proof of the extraordinary number of the proverbs. They are crystallizations of some forgotten fable or event (adagios)[723] or of a more personal anecdote (anexins), or the refrain of a long-lost song (rifões).[724] Or they are moral (maximas and sentenças), biblical (proverbios), satirical (dictados or ditados, ditos). Many of them embody the wisdom of the ages in a form admirably concise and forcible, e.g. Quem muito abarca pouco abraça (which is the very reverse of Portuguese history: e nulla stringe e tutto ’l mondo abbraccia), or Até ao lavar das cestas é vindima. Many of course correspond more or less closely to those of other countries, e.g. Muitos enfeitadores estragão a noiva (Too many cooks spoil the broth), Gato escaldado de agua fria ha medo (The burnt child fears the fire); Manhan ruiva, ou vento ou chuva (= Alba gorri, hegoa edo uri); Pedra movediça não cria bolor (= Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse).[725] Many of these saws as well as the contos (folk-tales) have their birth at fiandões as the women sit spinning, or as nossas velhas sit at their cottage doors and gossip in the sun (soalheiro), or as all gather round the spacious lareira. After the day’s work on the farm, in field and granary, to the sound of singing, legend and tradition come into their own of an evening round the great fire of logs and scented brushwood. The contos have been collected by Z. Consiglieri Pedroso, Portuguese Folk Tales (London, 1882); F. Adolpho Coelho, Contos Populares Portuguezes (Lisboa, 1879); Dr. Theophilo Braga, Contos Tradicionaes do Povo Portuguez (2 vols., Porto, 1883); F. X. de Athaide Oliveira, Contos Tradicionaes do Algarve (2 vols., Tavira, 1900, 5). As was to be expected, they have their equivalents in the folklore of other nations, a fact which does not prevent them from possessing an indigenous character, a charm and flavour of their own. The glowing imagination of the peasants spins out fairy and allegorical tales with marvellous facility. Thus old Mother Poverty (Tia Miseria) owned a pear-tree in front of her cottage, and had obtained the privilege that whoever went up it to steal her pears should be unable to come down. When Death comes she asks him to fetch her one more pear. Once up the tree all the priests and lawyers cannot bring him down, and only when he agrees to the bargain that Poverty shall never die is she willing to release him.

A great part of the popular literature has been set down in cold print during the last half-century. Much remains ungarnered. In every province there are peculiar words, phrases, traditions, heirlooms of times prehistoric, waiting to be gathered in, and both the Portuguese literature and the Portuguese language of the future will owe a debt of gratitude to their collectors, and find rich material in the pages of the Revista Lusitana.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 2 The Galician Revival

For over four hundred years—with the exception of a few poems by Padres José Sanchez Feijoo and Martín Sarmiento[726] in the eighteenth century—the Galician language held aloof from literature. It was peculiarly fitting that at a time when Portugal was recovering for her own literature the early Galician lyrics, which are now one of its most precious possessions, a new company of poets should have sprung up in the region now, as of old, fertil de poetas[727]—Galicia. They were no doubt multiplied and encouraged by the discovery of the Cancioneiros, but began independently of these, in the wake of that regionalism which manifested itself so vigorously in the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance in Provence, Catalonia, and Valencia. Besides their general character—the mingling of irony and sentimental melancholy—and a few conscious imitations, the new poets and the ancient Cancioneiros present several striking similarities. It is now some three-quarters of a century since regionalism in Galicia assumed its first literary pretensions. In 1861 the poets had become sufficiently numerous and distinguished to warrant the holding of Juegos Florales (xogos froraes) at La Coruña. Juan Manuel Pintos (1811-76) had published eight years earlier a small volume of verses, A Gaita Gallega (Pontevedra, 1853), and Francisco Añon (1817-78) had contributed poems to various local newspapers. Añon led the life of a wandering jogral of old, and his occasional verses soon won him popularity, so that he came to be regarded as the father of modern Galician poetry. He could express his love for his native province in the tender and melancholy stanzas (abbcdeec) A Galicia, and in his other poems, at once ingenuous and satirical; he is also thoroughly Galician and foreshadowed the poetry that was to follow. A leaflet of his verses appeared in the year after his death, Poesías (Noya, 1879), and a more satisfactory collection ten years later: Poesías Castellanas y Gallegas (1889). José María Posada y Pereira (1817-86), born at Vigo, the son of a Vigo advocate, published his first volume of verses in 1865 and others were collected in Poesías Selectas (1888). The second part of this collection (pp. 111-250) is written in Spanish, but the Galician poems include a series of letters in octosyllabic verse, the wistful humour of which is attractive. Born in the same year as Añon, he survived Rosalía de Castro, twenty years his junior. He survived in disillusion, for he had been one of the pioneers and now felt himself neglected in the changed conditions. When the first floral games were celebrated the most talented of these early poets, Alberto Camino (1821-61), had but a few months to live. Another generation passed before his poems were published: Poesías Gallegas (1896). Camino was not a prolific writer, and this tiny book contains but twelve of his poems; but there is not one of them that we would willingly miss, whether he is giving harmonious form to a poignant theme, as in Nai Chorosa and O Desconsolo, or in lighter verses describing with a contagious glow and spirit some scene of village merriment, as in A Foliada de San Joan or Repique.

Galician patriots, indignant at the neglect or contempt habitually meted out to their region, might persevere in their belief that the language which had produced the cantigas of King Alfonso X, the Portuguese Cancioneiros, and the poems of Macías was capable of revival as an instrument of poetry; but it was for the most part by scattered poems, manuscript or printed in periodicals (especially the Coruña paper Galicia, 1860-6), that they justified their faith, until in 1863 appeared Cantares Gallegos by Rosalía de Castro[728] (1837-85). The authoress, born at Santiago, was but twenty-six when this collection of poems gave her a wider celebrity than has been granted to any Galician writer since Macías. Emilio Castelar wrote a preface for her second volume, Follas Novas (1880), and hailed her as ‘a star of the first order’. Indeed, so great was her fame as a Galician singer that until recently it obscured her Spanish poems, En las orillas del Sar (1884). It was an unsought fame. Rosalía de Castro wrote much more than she published and destroyed much that was worth publishing. She sank herself in Galicia; her voice is that of the Galician gaita in all its varying moods. In her preface to Cantares Gallegos she wrote: ‘I have taken much care to reproduce the true spirit of our people.’ That she succeeded in this all critics are agreed. A favourite method in the Cantares Gallegos is to take a popular quatrain and develop it at some length, as, for instance, in the beautiful variations on the lines Airiños, airiños, aires, Airiños da miña terra, Airiños, airiños, aires, Airiños, levaime á ela.[729] Here, as throughout the book, there is such yearning passionate sadness that we may say, in her own words, non canta que chora. The sadness is of soedade and brooding over her country’s plight. She has felt all the peasants’ sorrows, the longing of the emigrant for his country, the fate of the women at home who find no rest from toil but in the grave,[730] above all the neglect and poverty in which those sorrows centre—with the result of sons torn from their families and scattered abroad to Castile and Portugal and across the seas in search of bread. Her themes are thus often homely; their treatment is always plaintive and musical. The metres used are very various. The book opens with a chain of muiñeiras singing Galicia frorida, and the rhythmical beat of the muiñeira constantly recurs throughout. Nothing could serve better to express, as she so marvellously expresses, the very soul of the Galician peasantry in its gentle, dreaming wistfulness and tearful humour. Her style is so thin and delicate, yet so flowing and natural, that it is more akin, almost, to music than to language. Few writers have attained such perfection without a trace of artifice. It is Galician—esta fala mimosa[731]—seen at its best, clear, soft, and pliant, rising in protest or reproach to a silvery eloquence. In Follas Novas the melancholy note is accentuated, without becoming morbid: the new leaves are autumnal. The music of her sad and exquisite poetry had been forged in the crucible of her own not imaginary suffering and grief, and in these lyrics she utters her inmortales deseios (immortal longings) as well as the woes of the peasant women of Galicia, ‘widows of the living and widows of the dead’. New metres are introduced, the old skill and perfection of form is maintained. A few poems in the second half even succeed in repeating that identification between the poet and the genius of the people which makes much of Cantares Gallegos almost anonymous and assures its immortality.

Midway between the publication of Cantares Gallegos and Follas Novas appeared the first volume of Galician verse by the blind poet of Orense, Valentín Lamas Carvajal (1849-1906). This book, Espiñas, Follas e Frores (1871), has remained the most popular of his works.[732] He is a true poet of the soil (poeta del terruño), the soil of Galicia which he sings with melancholy charm, and his verse is filled with soedades. He complains of the peasant’s lot, protests against its injustice and the tyranny of the caciques, laments the drain on Galicia’s best forces through emigration and military service, and his later work especially betrays a rustic cynicism and disillusion. But the value both of his first book and of Saudades Gallegas (1889) and A Musa d’as Aldeas (1890) is that in them speak the voices of the peasants. Only occasionally does Aesop or Macías intrude to dispel the charm, and even sophisticated touches—as when he speaks of ‘this century of enlightenment’, of Galicia as ‘a poetical garden’, or of the tamborileiro as ‘the inseparable companion’ of the gaiteiro—are not out of keeping, since the peasant, to whom a long word is a sign of education, will in ambitious moments use such phrases. The Galician peasants are shown in their sadness and superstitions, at their common tasks and festas. When Lamas Carvajal is describing an escasula[733] or a fiadeiro,[734] a dance in the beaten space before the doors (baile de turreiro), a foliada[735] in honour of some saint, a ruada or rueiro (street courting), a summer romaxe or romaria (pilgrimage), or autumn magosto (feast of chestnuts), his melancholy almost deserts him, and he can sing, in his own phrase,

The toil often becomes a festa, in which, he says, there is more mirth than in all the city’s joys. In Ey, boy, ey he admirably reproduces the thoughts of the slow-footed, slow-reasoning peasant as he trudges along to market in front of his droning and shrieking ox-cart. And, generally, all the life of the province of Orense is in his poems: witches, exorcisers, beatas, curandeiros (to whom the peasants turn in place of the doctor), pilgrims, blind singers, santeiros selling images of saints, the wailing alalaa, the evening litany or rosario, the angelus (Ave Maria or as animas, or tocar ás oraciós). The gaiteiro, of course, is a prominent figure, for without his bagpipe (the gaita gallega) and the accompanying drum (tamboril), cymbals (ferriñas, conchas), tambourine (pandeiro, pandeireta), and castanets (castañolas),[736] no village fête would be welcome or complete, and his alborada or his rhythmical dance-song, the muiñeira, is the emblem of all the peasant’s pleasures. Melancholy pervades the Rimas (1891) of D. Juan Bárcia Caballero (born in 1852), but it is no longer the melancholy of the peasant, but of the poet. His verse is more artificial and subjective, and expressions such as the ‘bed of Aurora’, ‘Olympic disdain’, ‘the Nereids’, carry us far away from the peasant scenes so pleasantly described by Lamas Carvajal. Yet in his lyrics lives a faint music which raises them above the commonplace. He writes of moonlight, the fall of the leaves, a flowing stream, tears, death, and admires Heine and Leopardi; but in his slight fancies, often built into a single brief sentence, he has a natural charm of his own.

Benito Losada (1824-91) gained great popularity in Galicia with his Contiños (1888), epigrammatic and often far from edifying stories in verse which mostly do not exceed ten lines. He is said to have had them printed on matchboxes ad maiorem gloriam, but for this he was probably not responsible. More interesting and equally racy of the soil are the poems of his Soaces d’un Vello (1886), of which the contiños d’a terra form only Part 3. The first part consists of a long legend in octosyllabic verse, and in the second some thirty poems give a coloured, homely, delightful picture of peasant life in Galicia:

—song and dance, the pot of chestnuts (zonchos) over the lareira fire on the night of All Saints’ Day, the ox-girl quietly singing, the girl with spindle and distaff keeping the cows, the sorrowful, hard-working peasant women, the priests exorcising those possessed by the Devil. The gay notes of the gaita with its plaintive undertone sound from his pages. The language, a garrida lengua nosa, has rarely been written more idiomatically or with a surer instinct for the force and fascination of the native word used in its rightful place. To turn from Losada to Eduardo Pondal (1835-1917), the poet of Ponteceso, a small village in the district of Coruña, is to go from a village praça to a high mountain-top. He stands quite apart from the other Galician poets.[738] Their irony and scepticism, sorrows and mirth, are mostly of the peasant. But here we have no dance or rustic merriment. The pipe and the drum give place to the wind blowing through an Aeolian harp. The poet

He is a lonely, martial spirit, disdainful but never arrogant, hating all servitude and looking upon a comfortable inertness as a kind of servitude. There is no pettiness in him, although details of Nature he may notice and love. The most learned of Galician poets, and not sparing of classical allusions, he is yet entirely merged in the forces of Nature and becomes a voice, a mystery. Some of his poems are a single sentence of perhaps twenty words, a musical cry borne slowly away on the wings of the wind. He sings of mists (the Gallegan brétoma) and pregnant silences, the whispering of the pines, the great chestnut-trees and Celtic oaks, of the swift daughter of the mists and the ‘intrepid daughter of the noble Celts’, of old forgotten far-off things, battles long ago. One must go to Ireland for a parallel. It has been noticed of him that he is entirely pre-Christian; he is almost prehistoric. His long epic on the discovery of America, in twenty-seven cantos, Os Eoas, remained unpublished at his death. Nor would it be easy to account for his popularity were it not for the poem by which he won early fame: A Campana d’Anllons. It is full of music and melancholy, a plaintive farewell addressed to his native village by a Galician peasant imprisoned at Oran. His subsequent verses, collected in Rumores de los Pinos (1879) and Queixumes dos Pinos (1886), if they could not increase his popularity, brought him a wide recognition among all lovers of poetry. The undefinable fascination of many of these poems is due to their aloofness, tenderness, and sorrowful music. He is a genuine Celtic bard, child of the wind and the rain, with Rosalía de Castro the truest poet produced by modern Galicia.

The most prominent of the later Galician poets was Manuel Curros Enriquez (1851-1908), whose work Aires d’a miña terra (1880) was condemned by the Bishop of Orense and republished in the following year. Born at Celanova in the middle of the nineteenth century, he studied law at Santiago de Compostela and became a journalist. His advanced opinions caused him to emigrate, first to London, then to South America. His anticlericalism was pronounced in Aires d’a miña terra, and even more so in a forcible satire describing a pilgrimage to Rome, written in triadas[740] and entitled O Divino Sainete (1888). He writes of dogma assassinating liberty, heaps abuse on Ignacio de Loyola, hails the advent of the railway to Galicia as bringing not priests but progress. All this has caused his poems to be widely read. But the reader has the agreeable surprise to find that many of them deal quite simply with the legends (A Virxe d’o Cristal) or customs (Unha Boda en Einibó, O Gueiteiro, &c.) of his native country, and show a true poetic power and a quiet and accurate observation of Nature. We forget all about anticlericalism and the Pope in reading of spring in Galicia, of the xentis anduriñas, the anemas ringing, and the children who come singing a mayo and asking for chestnuts. Curros Enriquez would not be a Galician were not his work of a melancholy cast, and the charm of some of his poems is also indigenous. The torch of Galician poetry burnt on after Curros Enriquez had ceased to write. D. Evaristo Martelo Pauman (born c. 1853) in his Líricas Gallegas (1891) showed that he possessed the traditional charm and satire of Galician verse, but a charm and satire that in his case had become all individual and subjective. Aureliano J. Pereira (†1906), author of Cousas d’a Aldea (1891), displayed a rustic humour in sketching with many a gay note the life of the Galician peasantry, and, in his more subjective poems, a very real and delicate lyrical gift. A sly humour also marks the work of Alberto García Ferreiro (1862-1902) in Volvoretas (1887) and Chorimas (1890). It is sometimes marred by the bitterness of his anticlerical and anti-Spanish feeling. In the stream’s voice he hears a murmur against the mayor and the judge, the cacique is ‘dragon, tiger and snake’, the monks and priests are greedy and ignorant. On the other hand, when they describe a fair (N’a feira) or a pilgrimage or the woes of the Galician emigrant, his poems are moving, vivid, and full of local colour. In a slight volume of poems, Salayos (1895), Manuel Núñez González (1865-1917) shows true lyrical power. They are poems in Galician rather than of Galicia, telling in a plaintive music of night, autumn, morriña, soedades. For all the author’s love of his smaller country, it is Galicia seen from without,[741] or sung from memory. The ‘vintage songs and the gay din of chestnut gatherings’ are no longer, as with Losada and Lamas, a part of life, but ‘a dream in the ideal realm of thought’,[742] a subject of disillusion and regret. Folerpas[743] (1894) by D. Eladio Rodríguez González (born in 1864) is also essentially not of the people. In its less elaborate poems it often describes, attractively and with much colour, popular customs and dances, the night of St. John, as festas d’a miña terra. Yet after recording the pleasant superstition that on St. John’s Day the sun rises dancing, the author must needs pause to say ‘away with these fanatical beliefs, unworthy of a civilized region’, to which the answer is that such reflections may be sincere but are unworthy of poetry, and should be expressed in prose. But the author of these verses can, when he wishes, identify himself with the peasants whose life he depicts,[744] and is capable of writing poems of great delicacy. The general impression is that he has not grown up among these scenes but is observing them keenly as might a stranger. The edict of the Archbishop of Santiago (June 26, 1909), which made it a deadly sin to read Fume de Palla (1909), by ‘Alfredo Nun de Allariz’, as containing impious, blasphemous, and heretical propositions, gave these poems a wider publicity than they might otherwise have attained, and they received a second edition in the same year. It certainly savours of blasphemy and is bad criticism to call Curros Enriquez the Galician Christ, but it is to be feared that the excommunication of the author will only encourage him to abandon ‘simple verses written without art’, as in his preface he describes these, for more studied poems with a thesis to prove. It is perhaps disquieting to find that three poets in most respects so different, agree in this, that between them and popular poetry a gulf is fixed, owing to the sensitive aloofness of a true poet (for Núñez González was undoubtedly the most talented of the younger Galicians), or owing to the adoption of the superior standpoint of the rationalist or the anticlerical. Younger poets of remarkable promise and achievement are D. Gonzalo López Abente (born in 1878), a relative of Eduardo Pondal, whom he sometimes recalls in the original inspiration of Escumas da Ribeira (1914) and Alento da Raza (1917); D. Antonio Noriega Varela (born in 1869), whose deep love for his native moors and mountains gives an eternal magic to Montañesas (1904) and D’O Ermo (1920); D. Ramón Cabanillas, who voices the sorrows and aspirations of Galicia in Vento Mareiro and Da Terra Asoballada (1917); and D. Antonio Rey Soto, who, however, writes chiefly in Castilian. D. Xavier Prado expresses the very soul of the peasantry in A Caron do Lume (1918). The poets of the last half-century have unquestionably justified the literary revival of the Galician language, and even if in the future no poetry of the highest order be written in Galicia, it is unthinkable that so musical an instrument should be allowed to perish. Galician poetry may be a thin, an elfin music, a scrannel voice, as of a wind blowing through tamarisks, but it has a natural charm, a raciness, a native atmosphere which give it a peculiar flavour and attraction. Literary contests, veladas, certames, xogos froraes, keep the flame of poetry alive in Galicia, but in its anonymous form it is a very vigorous growth which needs no fostering, and flourishes now as it flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as it flourished in the time of the Romans. Hundreds of anonymous quadras (cantiga, cantar, cantariño, cantilena, cantiguela, cantiguiña, copra, or canció) have been collected in the Cancionero Popular Gallego (Madrid, 3 vols., 1886) by José Pérez Ballesteros (†1918). The peasant women compose and sing their songs to-day[745] as when Fray Martín Sarmiento (1695-1772) noticed that en Galicia las mujeres no solo son poetisas sino tambien músicas naturales,[746] or the Marqués de Montebello listened to los tonos que a coros cantan con fugas y repeticiones las mozuelas, or the Archpriest of Hita watched the cantaderas dancing (as well as singing) in neighbouring Asturias.[747]

The ancient muiñeira rhythm continues, and the parallel-strophed songs of the early Cancioneiros have their echoes in the anonymous poetry of to-day. It is, indeed, of interest to note how the poets of the revival fall quite naturally into the same parallelism and the same repetition.[748] Besides these muiñeiras the popular poetry consists principally of quadras.[749] Traditional romances are nearly non-existent. This popular poetry (soft, musical, malicious, satirical) connects by a thread of anonymous song the Galicia of to-day with the whole of its past life, and the revivalists are likely to prosper in proportion as they seek their inspiration in popular sources, as did Rosalía de Castro. For the Galician peasants, living in a land of mists and streams, inlet arms of sea, dark pinewoods, deep-valleyed mountains, green maize-fields, and grey mysterious rocks, a land of spirits and fairies and witches, of legends and ruins, have the Celt’s instinct and love of poetry. Poetry is their natural expression. For prose in Galician literature there is less genius, and perhaps less incentive, since the country has been described with intimate knowledge and charm in the Castilian novels of Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921) and Don Ramón María del Valle-Inclán (born in 1870), and more recently by Don Jaime Solá (born in 1877). But the value and possibilities of Galician prose have been shown by D. Aurelio Ribalta (born in 1864) in Ferruxe (1894) and by D. Manuel Lugris y Freire (born in 1863) in Contos de Asieumedre (1909). It is, indeed, in the conto that especial success has been won, and Heraclio Pérez Placer, whose novel Predicción appeared in 1887, is widely known for his Contos, Leendas e Tradiciós de Galicia (1891), Contos da Terriña (1895), and Veira do Lar (1901). Contos da Terriña, thirty-four stories in some two hundred brief pages, are various and unequal in value. Most of them are sad, even the harmless St. Martin magosto ends in a death. They contain many intimate descriptions of Galicia and the life of the villages about Orense. There is much pathos in Velliña, miña velliña!, in Rapañota de Xasmís, and especially in Follas Secas, an exquisite picture of an old peasant dying alone in a dark room—its walls are black with smoke, yellow maize-cobs hang from the ceiling—while through the open door come all the gay sounds and colours of a Galician vintage. The poetess Francisca Herrera, author of Almas de Muller (1915) and Sorrisas e Bágoas (1918), has recently turned to prose with remarkable success in Néveda (1920). Few Galician poets have published volumes of prose, although many have contributed as journalists to the local press, but it would be difficult to find a prose-writer who is not also a poet.[750] And it is by its poetry that Galicia has won for itself a notable place in modern literature and added another leaf to the literary laurels of the Peninsula.

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