II 1325-1521

§ 1 Early Prose

With prose a new period opens, since, although there are Portuguese documents of the late twelfth century[104] and the Latin chrysalis was in an advanced stage of development even earlier, prose as a literary instrument does not begin before the fourteenth century or the end of the thirteenth at the earliest. The fragments of an early Poetica[105] clearly show how slow and awkward were still the movements of prose at a time when poetry had attained an exceedingly graceful expression. The next two centuries redressed the balance in the favour of prose. The victory of Aljubarrota (1385) made it possible to carry on the national work begun by King Dinis—the preparation of Portugal’s resources for a high destiny. In this constructive process literature was not forgotten, and indeed its deliberate encouragement, as though it were an industry or a pine-forest, may account for the fact that it consisted mainly of prose—chronicles, numerous translations from Latin, Spanish, and other languages, works of religious or practical import. The first kings of the dynasty of Avis, who rendered noble service to Portuguese literature, were not poets, and in the second half of the fifteenth century Spanish influence, checked at Aljubarrota, succeeded by peaceful penetration in recovering all and more than all that it had lost, till it became common to hear lyrics of Boscan sung in the streets of Lisbon,[106] and uncommon for a Portuguese poet to versify in his mother tongue.[107] Prose was more national. King Dinis had encouraged translation into Portuguese, and among other works his grandfather King Alfonso the Learned’s Cronica General was translated by his order. The only edition that we have, Historia Geral de Hespanha (1863), is cut short in the reign of King Ramiro (cap. ccii, p. 192). The first ‘O’ of the preface in the manuscript contains the king in purple robe and crown of gold, pen in hand, with a book before him. The style is primitive, often a succession of short sentences beginning with ‘And’.[108] In the convents brief lives of saints, portions of the Bible, prayers and regulations were written in Portuguese. Thus we have thirteenth-or fourteenth-century fragments of the rules of S. Bento, Fragmentos de uma versão antiga da regra de S. Bento, with its traces of a Latin original (e. g. os desprezintes Deos = contemnentes Deum); the Actos dos Apostolos, written in the middle of the fifteenth century by Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça and Frei Nicolao Vieira, that is, copied by them from an older manuscript; the eloquent prayers (Libro de Horas) translated by another Alcobaça monk, Frei João Claro (†1520?); the Historias abreviadas do Testamento Velho, printed from a manuscript of the fourteenth century, or of the thirteenth retouched in the fourteenth. The translation is close; the style foreshadows that of the Leal Conselheiro. The importance of these and other fragmentary versions of the Bible, in which there can rarely be a doubt as to the meaning of the words, is obvious. Extracts from the Vida de Eufrosina and the Vida de Maria Egipcia, published in 1882 by Jules Cornu from the manuscripts formerly in the Monastery of Alcobaça, now in the Torre do Tombo, show that they were written in vigorous if primitive prose (14th c.). A Lenda dos Santos Barlaam e Josaphat is perhaps a little later (end of the fourteenth or beginning of the fifteenth century). The Visão de Tundalo, of which the Latin original, Visio Tundali, was written by Frei Marcos not long after the date of the vision (1140), exists in two Portuguese versions, probably both of the fifteenth century (Monastery of Alcobaça). The Vida de Santo Aleixo also exists in two codices belonging to the middle and beginning of the fifteenth century, and Dr. Esteves Pereira, who published the latter, considers that the variants point to an earlier manuscript of the beginning of the fourteenth or end of the thirteenth century. To about the same period (14th-15th c.) belong the Lenda de Santo Eloy, the Vida de Santo Amaro, the Vida de Santa Pelagia, and many similar short devout treatises and legends which concern literature less than the development of the Portuguese language. Both literature and philology are interested in the early fifteenth-century work printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos from the manuscript in the Vienna Hofbibliothek: O Livro de Esopo, which consists not of direct translations[109] from Exopo greguo of Antioch but of estorias ffremosas de animalias, told in the manner of Aesop, half a century before William Caxton and Robert Henryson, with great naturalness, vigour, and brevity.

The earliest entry of the Cronica Breve do Archivo Nacional is dated 1391, and both it and the Cronicas Breves e memorias avulsas de Santa Cruz de Coimbra are laconic annals of the first kings of Portugal, a few lines covering a whole reign. The Livro da Noa de Santa Cruz de Coimbra is an extract from the Livro das Heras of the same convent, and is, as the latter title indicates, a similar simple chronicle of events by years.[110] It begins in Latin, then Latin and Portuguese entries alternate till 1405. From 1406 to the end (1444) they are exclusively Portuguese. The Cronica da Ordem dos Frades Menores (1209-85) is a fifteenth-century Portuguese translation of a fourteenth-century Latin chronicle, and has been carefully edited by Dr. J. J. Nunes from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional; the Vida de D. Tello (15th c.), and the Vida de S. Isabel, the Queen-consort of King Dinis (earlier 15th c.), are ‘historical’ biographies which contain more legend and less history than the Cronica da Fundaçam do Moesteiro de S. Vicente de Lixboa (Cronica dos Vicentes), a fifteenth-century version from a Latin original, Indiculum, of the eleventh century. There is far more life if equal brevity in the Cronica da Conquista do Algarve (Cronica de como Dom Payo Correa. .. tomou este reino de Algarve aos Moros)—a rapid, vivid sketch which reads almost like a chapter out of Fernam Lopez. Here at last was some one with will and power to make the dry bones live.[111] But meanwhile history of another kind had been written from a very early date. As a first rough catalogue of names the livros de linhagens, books of descent, as they were called by their compilers,[112] go back farther than the chronicles or religious prose, but so far as concerns their claim to literary form they belong like those to the fourteenth century. Of the four that have come down to us the Livro Velho is a jejune family register (11th-14th c.); the second is a mere fragment of the same kind. The manuscript of the third (O Nobiliario do Collegio dos Nobres) was bound up with the Cancioneiro da Ajuda, and together with the fourth, O Nobiliario do Conde D. Pedro, represents the lost original of the Livro de Linhagens of D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos (1289-1354). The Nobiliario do Conde has been shown by Alexandre Herculano, who printed it from the manuscript in the Torre do Tombo, to be the work of various authors extending over more than a century (13th-14th), the Conde de Barcellos being but one of them. It was in fact compiled like a modern peerage,[113] and was not intended to be final, new entries being added as time made them necessary, so that the passage diz O Conde D. Pedro em seu livro is as natural as the mention of Innocencio da Silva in a later volume of his great dictionary. But it was this son of King Dinis who with infinite diligence searched for documents far and wide, had recourse to the writings of King Alfonso X and others, and spared no pains to give the work an historical as well as a genealogical character. His researches (Ouue de catar, he says, por gram trabalho por muitas terras escripturas que fallauam das linhagens) set an excellent example to Fernam Lopez. Certainly the Livro de Linhagens is a vast catalogue of names, with at most a brief note after the name, as ‘he was a good priest’ or ‘a very good poet’; but it also gives succinct stories of the Kings of the Earth from Adam, including Priam, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and the early kings of Portugal, and it contains rare but charming intervals, green oases of legend and anecdote, such as the tale of King Lear with its happy ending, or the account of King Ramiro going to see his wife, who was a captive of the Moors.[114] Count Pedro, by his humanity and his generous conception of what a genealogy should be, really made the book his own. It was naturally consulted by the early chroniclers, its worth was recognized by the ablest author of the Monarchia Lusitana,[115] and recently, in the skilful hands of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, it has rendered invaluable service in reconstructing the lives of the thirteenth-century poets.[116]

The Livro de Linhagens refers not only to King Lear but to Merlin, King Arthur, Lancelot, and the Isle of Avalon. Many other allusions, both earlier and later, to the Breton cycle, the matière de Bretagne, are to be found in early Portuguese literature: to the lovers Tristan and Iseult, to the cantares de Cornoalha,[117] to the chivalry of the Knights of the Round Table. In the fourteenth century many in Portugal were baptized with the name of Lancelot, Tristan, and Percival; and Nun’ Alvarez (1360-1431) chose Galahad for his model, and came as near realizing his ideal as may be given to mortal man. In Gil Vicente’s time the name Percival had already descended to the sphere of the peasants: as Passival (i. II) in 1502 (Auto Pastoril Castelhano) and Pessival (i. 117) in 1534 (Auto de Mofina Mendes).

The early Portuguese Cancioneiros contain many references to this cycle, and the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti opens with five celebrated songs,[118] imitations of Breton lais, with rubrics explaining their subjects, and mentioning King Arthur and Tristan, Iseult, Cornwall, Maraot of Ireland, and Lancelot. Whether they were incorporated in the Cancioneiro from a Portuguese Tristam earlier than the Spanish version (1343?), or, as is more probable, directly from the Old-French Historia Tristani, their presence here is a sufficient witness to the Portuguese fondness for such themes. It was but natural that a Celtic people living by the sea, delighting in vague legends and in foreign novelties, should have felt drawn towards these misty tales of love and wandering adventure, which carried them west as far as Cornwall and Ireland, and also East, through the search for the Holy Grail. It was natural that they should undergo their influence earlier and more strongly than their more direct and more national neighbours the Castilians, whose clear, definite descriptions in the twelfth-century Poema del Cid would send those legends drifting back to the dim regions of their birth. (Even to-day connexion with and sympathy for Ireland is far commoner in Galicia than in any other part of Spain.) Unhappily, most of the early Portuguese versions of the Breton legends have been lost. King Duarte in his library possessed Merlim, O Livro de Tristam, and O Livro de Galaaz. The probability that these were written in Portuguese, not in Spanish, is increased by the survival of A Historia dos Cavalleiros da Mesa Redonda e da Demanda do Santo Graall, as yet only partially published from the manuscript (2594) in the Vienna Hofbibliothek. It was written probably in the fourteenth century, perhaps at the end of the thirteenth, although the Vienna manuscript is more recent and belongs to the fifteenth century, in which the work was referred to by the poet Rodriguez de la Cámara.[119] It is a Portuguese version of the story of the Holy Grail, and, although not a continuous translation, was evidently written with the French original (doubtfully ascribed to Robert de Boron,[120] author of a different work on the same subject) constantly in view. Traces of French remain in its prose.[121] This was clearly part of a larger work,[122] perhaps of a whole cycle of works dealing with the search for the Holy Grail. The only others that we have in print are the Estorea de Vespeseano and the Livro de Josep ab Arimatia, the manuscript of which was discovered in the nineteenth century in the Torre do Tombo. This, in the same way as the Demanda do Santo Graall, is a later (16th c.) copy of a thirteenth-fourteenth-century Portuguese translation or adaptation from the French, and retains in its language signs of French origin. The incunable Estorea de Vespeseano (Lixboa, 1496) is a work in twenty-nine short chapters, which only incidentally[123] refers to the Holy Grail, but recounts vividly the event mentioned in the Demanda[124]: the destruction of Jerusalem by Vespasian and Titus. It was also known formerly as Destroyçam de Jerusalem.[125] It is an anonymous translation, made in the middle of the fifteenth century, not from the French Destruction de Jérusalem, but from the Spanish Estoria del noble Vespesiano (c. 1485 and 1499). Dr. Esteves Pereira believes that the 1499 Spanish edition is a retranslation from the Portuguese text originally translated from the Spanish.

Tennyson’s revival of the Arthurian legend in England evoked no corresponding interest in Portugal in the nineteenth century, and the primitive and touching story as published in 1887 has left Sir Percival in the very middle of an adventure for over a generation. The descent of the Amadis romances from the noble ideal of chivalry of King Arthur’s Court is obvious, but their exact pedigree, the date and nationality of the first ancestor of the Amadis who is still with us, has been the subject of some little contention.

Amadis de Gaula has indeed been doubly fortunate. The successor of Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan as a fearless and loyal knight, he early won his way in the Peninsula; he was spared by the priest and barber in the Don Quixote scrutiny, and now when Vives’ ‘pestiferous books’,[126] those ‘serious follies’, are no longer read widely, he has received a new span of immortality as a corpse of Patroclus between the contending critics. The problem of the date and authorship has become more fascinating than the book. Champions for Spain and Portugal come forward armed for the fight: Braunfels, Gayangos, Baist are met by Theophilo Braga, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, while Dr. Henry Thomas holds the scales. The ground is thick with their arrows. And beneath them all lies the simple ingenuous story as retold by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo in or immediately after 1492 and published in 1508, still worth reading for its freshness and for its clear good style, which Braunfels, following up the praise in Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la Lengua (c. 1535), declared could not be a translation.[127] The argument, conclusive in the case of the masterpiece of prose that is Palmeirim de Inglaterra, loses its force here, since Montalvo himself tells us that he corrected the work from old originals. Naturally we are curious to know what these antiguos originales were, but the question did not arise in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: readers did not then concern themselves greatly with the origin and authorship of a book; they were content to enjoy it. Evidently Amadis was enjoyed both in Spain and Portugal. It is mentioned in the middle of the fourteenth century in the Spanish translation, by Johan Garcia de Castrogeriz, of Egidio Colonna’s De regimine principum, at the very time, that is, when the Spanish poet and chronicler, Pero López de Ayala (1332-1407), was reading Amadis in his youth.[128] Half a century later, in the last quarter of the fourteenth century, a poem by Pero Ferrus in the Cancionero de Baena refers to Amadis as written in three books. This is one of the most definite early references to Amadis, but of course reference to the book by a Spaniard does not necessarily imply that it was written in Spanish, and indeed some of the vaguer allusions may refer to a French or Anglo-French original. The most frequent Spanish references occur in the Cancionero de Baena, which was compiled in the middle of the fifteenth century, at a period, that is, which the last Galician lyrics written in Spain connected with the time when all eyes were turned to Portuguese as the universal language of Peninsular lyrics. Because the Portuguese language was used throughout Spain in lyric poetry, it is sometimes argued as if the Portuguese had no prose, could only sing. (The more real division was not between verse and prose but between the Portuguese lyrical love literature and the Spanish epic battle literature, and the early romances of chivalry, although written in prose, belong essentially to the former.) The prose rubrics of the Portuguese Cancioneiros and the Poetica of the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti are sufficient to dispel this delusion. Whether this Poetica be contemporary (13th c.) of the lyrics or later (14th c.), it offers a striking contrast between the clumsiness of its prose and the smooth perfection of the poetry for which it theorizes. Miguel Leite Ferreira’s statement (1598) that Amadis is contemporary with the lyrics is therefore remarkable. He says that the archaic (time of King Dinis) language of the two sonnets—Bom Vasco de Lobeira and Vinha Amor pelo campo trebelhando—written by his father, Antonio Ferreira (1528-69), is the same as that in which Vasco de Lobeira wrote Amadis of Gaul. We know that King Dinis encouraged not only lyric poetry but also translations into Portuguese prose, but all the early Portuguese prose works are assigned to the fourteenth, not the thirteenth century. One of the earliest, the Demanda do Santo Graall, the language of which bears a close relation to that of the Cancioneiros, still belongs to the fourteenth century. Probably the later development of prose misled Leite Ferreira into making fourteenth-century prose contemporary with thirteenth-century verse. The Infante whom he here on the strength of the passage in Montalvo’s Amadis identifies with the son of King Dinis, not with the earlier Prince Afonso (c. 1265-1312), may as Infante have expressed dislike of a certain incident (the treatment of Briolanja) in the already well-known story, and his preference would be borne in mind when the Portuguese version was written in his reign (1325-57). If the first Peninsular version of Amadis was composed in Portuguese in the middle of the fourteenth century, it may have been eagerly read as a novelty by López de Ayala. In the fourteenth century most Spaniards read, a few wrote[129] Portuguese lyrics; and there seems to be no reason why we should rigorously confine them to the reading of verse, to the exclusion of Portuguese prose. There is no means of deciding with certainty whether López de Ayala and Ferrus read Amadis in Spanish or in Portuguese, but there are inherent probabilities in favour of Portuguese. No one without a thesis to support would deny that, generally, the cycle of the Round Table, to which Amadis is so closely related, was more congenial to the Portuguese than to the Spanish temperament, that the geographical position of Portugal facilitated its introduction, and that, in the particular case of Amadis, the style and subject of the work, certainly of the first three books, are Portuguese rather than Spanish. Melancholy incidents, sentimental phrases and tears occur on nearly every page. Some critics even discern traces of Portuguese in the language.[130]

But if we admit that Amadis was written c. 1350, who was its author? It is noteworthy that while in Spanish it had been attributed to many persons, in Portugal tradition has persistently hovered round the name of Lobeira. Unfortunately the Lobeira authorship has given far more trouble than that of prince, Jew, or saint in Spain. Zurara, basing his statement on an earlier fifteenth-century authority, in a perfectly genuine passage of his Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses,[131] written in the middle of the fifteenth century, ascribes Amadis to Vasco de Lobeira. In the next century Dr. João de Barros[132] (not the historian) and Leite Ferreira agree with Zurara.[133] There was no reason why they should say Vasco rather than Pedro or João. According to Nunez de Leam, Vasco de Lobeira was knighted on the field of Aljubarrota (1385), according to Fernam Lopez he was already a knight in 1383.[134] If he was not a young but an old knight at Aljubarrota, it is just possible that he wrote the book thirty-five years earlier, in the same way that the historian Barros wrote Clarimundo in his youth.

If he lived on through the reigns of Pedro I (1357-67) and Fernando (1376-83), and acquired new distinction in battle in the reign of the latter, this might account for Zurara’s assertion that he wrote Amadis in the reign of Fernando. But the chief obstacle to the authorship of Vasco is the existence in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti (Nos. 230 and 232 A) of a song by Joan de Lobeira, Leonoreta, fin roseta, which reappears with slight variations in Montalvo’s Amadis (Lib. II, cap. xi: este villancico). It would seem then that Joan, not Vasco, wrote Amadis. Joan de Lobeira,[135] or Joan Pirez Lobeira, flourished in the second half of the thirteenth century, and so we have Amadis dating not only from the reign of King Dinis but from the first half of his reign. But does the existence of the poem entail that of a prose romance? The early mention of Tristan, e.g. by Alfonso X, does not necessarily imply the existence of a thirteenth-century Peninsular Tristan in prose. May we not accept the poem, written in the stirring metre, dear to men of action, used by Alfonso X (C. M. 300), as merely a proof of the popularity of the story, fondness for an episode perhaps treated in greater detail in the Anglo-French original than in Montalvo’s version? Certainly it is in the highest degree improbable that a Spaniard, writing at the end of the fifteenth century, should extract a poem from the Portuguese Cancioneiros and insert it in his prose; but the improbability disappears if in the middle of the fourteenth century a Portuguese (Vasco de Lobeira), perhaps drawn to the story by the poem of his ancestor, incorporated it in his romance. The late Antonio Thomaz Pires in 1904 discovered at Elvas the will of a João de Lobeira, mercador, who died there in 1386, and in Dr. Theophilo Braga’s latest opinion[136] there were three Portuguese versions of Amadis: that of the father, this João de Lobeira, written in the time of King Dinis (a long-lived race these Lobeiras!), that of the son,[137] Vasco, and a third by Pedro de Lobeira in the first half of the fifteenth century. The threefold authorship of this family heirloom is even more cruu de creer than the theory that a single Lobeira—Vasco—wrote it in the middle of the fourteenth century. A certain note of disapproval of Amadis as fabulous, shared by Portuguese and Spanish writers,[138] perhaps indicates a fairly late date: its irresponsible fiction would be less excusable if it was written in an age which was beginning to attach serious importance to nobiliarios and ‘true’ chronicles. Moreover, if the Portuguese adaptation of an Anglo-French legend had been even remotely as developed as the form in which we now have it, the Infante Afonso must have seen at once that the faithfulness of Amadis was absolutely essential to the story. But especially the fact that the Portuguese Cancioneiros, familiar with Tristan and the matière de Bretagne, are silent on the subject of Amadis is significant.

In Gottfried Baist’s argument, based on a rigid division between early lyric poetry (as Portuguese) and early prose (as Spanish), the Leonoreta lyric, far from being a stumbling-block, is actually a sign of the Spanish origin of Amadis: as a fragment (14th c.) of a prose Tristan exists in Spanish, and five Portuguese Tristan lais figure in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, so the Leonoreta poem belongs to a Spanish Amadis in prose. But although the priority and relations of early Portuguese and Spanish prose works are intricate and have not yet been thoroughly studied, it is clear that in many cases versions have been more carefully preserved in conservative Spain, while the Portuguese through neglect, fire, and earthquake have perished, and also that the natural tendency and development of prose, in view of the growing power of Castille and the greater pliancy of the Portuguese, was from Portuguese to Spanish, not from Spanish to Portuguese. And in one instance at least we have an early Portuguese prose work of the first importance, the Demanda do Santo Graall, which with its gallicisms can by no stretch of imagination be accounted a version from the Spanish. It is plainly legitimate to hold that the story of Amadis was first reduced to book form in the Peninsula in precisely the same way as was the story of Galahad, i.e. as a fourteenth-century Portuguese adaptation with the French text in view. Nicholas d’Herberay des Essarts, we know, claimed to have discovered fragments of Amadis en langage picard, Jorge Cardoso (1606-69) declared that Pero Lobeira translated Amadis from the French,[139] and Bernardo Tasso, whose Amadigi appeared in 1560, believed (non è dubbio) Amadis to be derived da qualche istoria di Bretagna. Nor would the Portuguese, for all their familiarity with the story and topography of the Breton cycle, be likely to compose original works dealing with Vindilisora (Windsor) or Bristoya (Bristol). Unhappily, however deep may be our conviction (a conviction which stands in no need of antedating Hebrew versions of the 1508 Amadis) that the Peninsular Amadis was originally Portuguese, it has now ceased to belong to Portuguese literature; another instance, if we may beg the question, of the gravitation to Spain. The Portuguese text, of which a copy, according to Leite Ferreira, existed in the library of the Duques de Aveiro in the sixteenth century (1598), and, according to the Conde da Ericeira, in the library of the Condes de Vimieiro in the seventeenth (1686), is still missing, as it was in 1726.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 2 Epic and Later Galician Poetry

Some of the poems of the early Cancioneiros, as we have seen, have an historical character, but they are all written from a personal point of view. Portuguese history, with its heroic achievements such as the conquest of Algarve, seems to have begun just too late to be the subject of great anonymous epics, or rather the temperament of the Portuguese people eschewed them. Of five poems, long believed to be the earliest examples of Portuguese verse but no longer accepted by any sane critic as genuine, only one belongs to epic poetry. This Poema da Cava or da Perda de Espanha was an infant prodigy indeed, since it was supposed to have been written (in oitavas) in the eighth century. With a discretion passing that of Horace it kept itself from the world not for nine but nine hundred years, and was first published in Leitão de Andrada’s Miscellanea (1629)[140]: O rouço da Cava imprio de tal sanha, &c.

Of the four other spurious poems, two[141] were alleged to be love letters of Egas Moniz Coelho, a cousin of the celebrated Egas Moniz Coelho of the twelfth century; another, published by Bernardo de Brito,[142] Tinherabos nam tinherabos, has a real charm as gibberish. Fascination, of a different kind, attaches also to the fifth:

for if this poem is not genuine, and the fact that it was first published by Brito[143] at once lays it open to grave suspicion, it is nevertheless undoubtedly based on popular tradition of a yearly tribute of maidens to the Moors such as the Greeks paid to the Minotaur, and must be the echo of some Algarvian song. Its simple repetitions have a haunting rhythm, but they are perhaps a little too emphatic. The impression is that its author had been struck by the repetitions in songs heard on the lips of the people, perhaps crooned to him in his infancy (cf. Miscellanea, p. 25: sendo eu muito menino), and worked them up in this poem. One early epic poem Portugal undoubtedly possessed, the Poema da Batalha do Salado, by Afonso Giraldez, who himself probably took part in the battle (1340). The subject of the poem is the same as that of the Spanish Poema de Alfonso Onceno, but whether its treatment was similar we cannot say, as only forty lines of the Galician-Portuguese poem survive. Since the authorship of the Spanish poem is doubtful and its rhymes run more naturally in Galician than in Spanish, the theory has arisen, among others, that Rodrigo Yannez, whose name perhaps denotes a connexion with Galicia, merely translated the poem of Afonso Giraldez. But against this it is argued that Yannez or Eanez was a Galician or wrote Galician lyrics (there are several poets of that name in the Cancioneiro da Vaticana), and when called upon to compose an epic—for Spain a late epic—chose Castilian, the traditional language of such poetry, and in executing his design found that his enthusiasm had outrun his knowledge of Castilian.[144] It is not strange if so brilliant a victory inspired two poets independently with its theme. It is perhaps more extraordinary that both should have chosen a metre (8 + 8) which has called for remark as showing the romance through the cantar de gesta.[145] Frei Antonio Brandão, indeed, called the Portuguese poem a romance, a type of poem which did not exist in the fourteenth century. Since the battle was fought in Spain it would be considered in Brandão’s day a proper subject for a romance, but would be noticeable as being written in Galician. Castilian was throughout the Peninsula regarded as the fitting medium for the romance, as for its father the epic, just as, a century earlier, Galician was the universal language of the lyric.[146] Portuguese poets, if they wrote a romance, would usually do so in Spanish. The best-known instance is Gil Vicente’s fine poem (muy sentido y galan as the 1720 editor says) of D. Duardos e Flerida, which only belongs to Portuguese literature through the excellent ‘translation of the Cavalheiro de Oliveira’, among whose papers Garrett professed to have found it. Portugal possessed no epic cantares de gesta of her own, had not therefore the stuff out of which the romances were formed, and the birth of the romance coincided with the predominance of Spanish influence in Spain. It is therefore surprising to find in Portugal a large number of romances unconnected with Spain, the explanation being that, having accepted with characteristic enthusiasm the new thing imported from abroad, the Portuguese turned to congenial themes, of love, religion, and adventure. Had the romances been elaborated in the same way as in Spain, we might have expected a large number of anonymous Portuguese romances dealing with the Breton cycle, and indeed with early Portuguese history, so rich in heroic incidents. The fact that this is not the case and the number of romances collected in Tras-os-Montes alike point to their Spanish origin, while their frequency in the Azores denotes how popular they became later in Portugal. In the sixteenth century their Spanish character was recognized. The poor escudeiro in Eufrosina is bidden go to Spain to gloss romances, and in the seventeenth century, as a passage in Mello’s Fidalgo Aprendiz well shows, they were better liked if written in Spanish. The partiality for Spanish applied to poetry of other kinds, and Manuel de Galhegos says (1635) that it is a bold venture to publish poetry in Portuguese.[147] But it did not as a rule extend to popular poetry. It is therefore noteworthy that the nurse in Gil Vicente sings romances in Spanish.[148] Dr. Theophilo Braga, who considers Spanish influence on the romances in Portugal to have been ‘late and insignificant’,[149] is obliged, in order to support his argument, to quote not Portuguese but Spanish romances.[150] Nor is it a happy contention that Portuguese romances were not printed owing to desleixo, since the publication of Spanish romances at Lisbon cannot be attributed merely to a craze for things foreign. More persuasive is the theory, developed by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos,[151] that many romances in Spanish were the work of Portuguese poets, especially those related to the Breton cycle, such as Ferido está Don Tristan, those concerned with the sea, and those of a soft lyrical character, as Fonte Frida and La Bella Malmaridada. However that may be, the fact that romances appear on the lips of the people in Gil Vicente, that is, before the publication of the romanceros, indicates how rapidly their popularity spread,[152] and accounts for their numerous progeny in Portugal, collected in the nineteenth century. True historical romances the Portuguese did not possess, unless we are to consider that certain lines which occur in Vicente’s parody of Yo me estaba allá en Coimbra, in Garcia de Resende’s Trovas, and elsewhere, are echoes of a Portuguese romance on the death of Inés de Castro.[153] But that is not to say that they did not possess romances, and many of these might be almost as old as their Spanish models, although not derived directly from cantares de gesta. These Portuguese romances or xacaras (in the Azores estorias and aravias) often differ from the Spanish in a certain vagueness of outline and sentimental tone. They are frequently of considerable length. Many of them are undoubtedly of popular origin and have a large number of variants in different parts of the country. If there are none to compare with Fonte Frida or Conde Arnaldos (which belong to Castilian literature, whatever the nationality of their authors), they nevertheless, with a total lack of concentration, present many natural scenes and incidents of affecting pathos and an attractive simplicity. One of the best and most characteristically Portuguese is A Nau Catharineta, and others almost equally famous are Santa Iria, Conde Nillo, and Brancaflor e Flores. The second edition of Dr. Theophilo Braga’s Romanceiro runs to nearly two thousand pages. The first two volumes contain over 150 romances (together with numerous variants). Of these 5 belong to the Carolingian, 8 to the Arthurian cycle, 63 are romances sacros or ao divino, 11 treat of the cruel husband or unfaithful wife. In the third volume are reprinted romances composed by well-known Portuguese authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It must be admitted that Spain generously repaid to Portugal the loan of the Galician language for lyrical composition—although in each case it was the lender’s literature that profited (especially if some of the most beautiful Spanish romances were the work of Galician or Portuguese poets). But even after the birth of the romance Spain continued to cultivate the Galician lyric, until the second half of the fifteenth century. The last instance is supposed to be a Galician poem by Gomez Manrique (1412-91), uncle of the author of Recuerde el alma dormida, No. 65 in the Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano. This collection, published by Professor Lang at the suggestion of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, contains the meagre crop of Portuguese verse of the transition period from 1350 to 1450, meagre in quality and quantity. One name dominates the period. The love and tragic fate of Macias (second half 14th c.), o Namorado, idolo de los amantes, gave him a renown similar to but far exceeding that of D. Joan Soarez de Paiva in the preceding century. As the ideal lover he is met with at every turn in the Portuguese poetry of the fifteenth century,[154] and later became the subject of Lope de Vega’s Porfiar hasta morir (1638). Of his story we know definitely nothing, but some lines in one of his poems, En meu cor tenno ta lança and Aquesta lança. .. me ferio, would appear to have inspired the famous legend which dates from the end of the fifteenth century. Imprisoned at Arjonilla in Andalucía for paying court to his sennora, he continued to address her in song and was killed by the lance that her infuriated husband hurled through the prison window. In an older version, that of the Constable D. Pedro in his Satira de felice e infelice vida, he saved the lady of his heart from drowning, and afterwards, as he lingered where she had stood, was struck down by the jealous husband. According to Argote de Molina,[155] both he and the husband served in the household of D. Enrique de Villena (1385-1434), who was perhaps only six when Macias died. Most of the twenty poems ascribed to Macias that survive are written in Galician, and of many, as Loado sejas amor,[156] the authorship is doubtful. Clearly his fame would act as a strong magnet to poems of uncertain origin. The matter is of the less importance in that these poems, however love-sick, have but little literary merit. If the Galician Juan Rodriguez de la Cámara, a native, like Macias, of Padron, was the real author of the romance of Conde Arnaldos (which is improbable), he was a far greater poet than his friend. Both the lyrics and the prose of his El Sieruo libre de Amor are in Castilian. Of the other two fourteenth-century Galician poets mentioned by Santillana, Fernam Casquicio and Vasco Perez de Camões (†1386?),[157] no poems have survived. The latter, a knight well known at the Court of King Ferdinand and an ancestor of Luis de Camões, played a leading part in the troubles preceding the battle of Aljubarrota, He had come to Portugal from Galicia, and his name appears frequently in the pages of Fernam Lopez (where it is written Caamoões) till the year 1386. In the middle of the sixteenth century he is mentioned by Sá de Miranda’s brother-in-law as a Court poet corresponding to Juan de Mena in Spain. But there were other poets whose verse was probably not inferior to that of Perez de Camões and Casquicio. Besides Macias the Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano contains the names of sixteen writers whose poems may not attain high distinction but prove that the Galician lyric continued to be cultivated by poets in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth century in Castille and Leon, Aragon and Catalonia. The Archdeacon of Toro, Gonçalo Rodriguez (fl. 1385),[158] was one of a group of such poets; a man with a keen zest of living and capable of vigorous verse, in which he took a characteristic delight (a minna boa arte de lindo cantar). In his farewell poem A Deus Amor, a Deus el Rei, which Cervantes perhaps remembered, he bids good bye to the trobadores con quen trobei, and in a quaint humorous testament he mentions a number of friends and relatives, two of whom, at least, his cousin Pedro de Valcacer or Valcarcel and Lope de Porto Carreiro, also wrote verse. In the last of the sixteen stanzas (abbacca) of this testamento the Archdeacon appoints his namesake Gonçalo Rodriguez de Sousa and Fernan Rodriguez to be his executors. He may have been alive in 1402, for a Doctor Gonçalo Rodriguez, Archdeacon of Almazan, is mentioned as one of the witnesses to the oath taken by the city of Burgos to the Infante María in that year.[159] In that case he must have been transferred to Almazan, some 150 miles farther up the Duero. More chequered was the career of Garci Ferrandez de Gerena (c. 1340-c. 1400). Having married one of King Juan I’s dancing girls (una juglara) in the belief that she was rich, he repented when he found que non tenia nada. He next became a hermit near Gerena, and, this not proving more congenial than married poverty, he embarked ostensibly for the Holy Land, but in fact landed at Malaga with his wife and children. At Granada he turned Moor, satirized the Christian faith, and deserted his wife for her sister. After such proven inconstancy we may perhaps doubt the sincerity of his repentance when he returned to Christianity and Castille at the end of the fourteenth century. But for all his weakness and folly he seems not to have sunk utterly out of the reach of finer feelings; he sang various episodes of his life, e.g. when he went to his hermitage (puso se beato), in lyrics of some charm, and addressed the nightingale in a dialogue, as did his contemporary, Alfonso Alvarez de Villasandino (c. 1345-c. 1428). This Castilian Court poet, born at Villasandino near Burgos and possessed of property at Illescas, was of a sleeker and more subservient mind than Garci Ferrandez and prospered accordingly, en onra e en ben e en alto estado. He wrote to order and was considered the ‘crown and king of all the poetas e trovadores who had ever existed in the whole of Spain’. This extravagant claim of his admirers need not prevent us from recognizing that there is often real feeling and music in his poems, of which the Cancionero de Baena has preserved over twenty. He writes in varying metres with unfailing ease and harmony, rarely sinks into mere verbal dexterity, and well deserves to be considered the best of these later Galician poets. Side by side with the lyric the cantiga d’escarnho continued to flourish. Alfonso Alvarez (C. G. C. 48) upbraids Garci Ferrandez for renouncing the Christian faith and leaguing himself with the Devil (gannaste privança do demo mayor); Pero Velez de Guevara (†1420), uncle of the Marqués de Santillana, addresses a satiric poem to an old maid, and an anonymous poet in a vigorous sirventes attacks degenerate Castille, cativa, mezela Castela, perhaps, as Professor Lang thinks, immediately after the Portuguese victories of Trancoso, Aljubarrota, and Valverde in 1385. Five fragmentary poems belong to the Infante D. Pedro (1429-66), Constable of Portugal. There are, besides his three short Portuguese poems in the Cancioneiro de Resende, only forty-one lines in all, for while Galician, already separated from her twin sister of Portugal, went to sleep—a sleep of nearly four centuries—in these last accents of her muse preserved in the Cancionero de Baena, the Infante Pedro turned definitely to the new forms of lyric appearing in Castille. As a transition poet he may be mentioned here before his father D. Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, since his prose works, which would naturally place him with his father and with D. Duarte, his uncle, belong, together with most of his poetry (prosas and metros) to Spanish literature. By stress of circumstance rather than any set purpose he inaugurated the fashion of writing in Castilian, a fashion so eagerly taken up by his fellow-countrymen during the next two centuries. After the tragic death of his father at Alfarrobeira (1449) he escaped from Portugal, of which his sister Isabel was queen,[160] spent the next seven years as an exile in Castille, and after returning to his native land died an exile, but now as King of Aragon (1464-6). His life of thirty-seven years was thus as full of wandering adventure as that of any troubadour of old. To him Santillana addressed his celebrated letter on the development of poetry, and his own influence on Portuguese literature was important, for he introduced not only a new style of poetry, including oitavas de arte maior, but the habit of classical allusion and allegory. His first work, Satira de felice e infelice vida, was written in Portuguese before he was twenty, but re-written by himself in Castilian, the only form in which it has survived. This firstfruit of his studies was dedicated to his sister, Queen Isabel, whose death (1455) he mourned in his Tragedia de la Insigne Reyna Doña Isabel (1457), a work of deep feeling and some literary merit, first published by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos 444 years after Queen Isabel’s death. His longest and most important poem, in 125 octaves, Coplas del menosprecio e contempto de las cosas fermosas del mundo (1455), reflects the misfortunes of his life and the high philosophy they had brought him. Under a false attribution to his father, the Duke of Coimbra[161] (his Portuguese poems were also wrongly ascribed to King Peter I of Portugal, through confusion with the later King Peter, of Aragon), it was incorporated in the Cancioneiro de Resende, which appeared half a century after the Constable’s death.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 3 The Chroniclers

The father of Portuguese history, Fernam Lopez (c. 1380-c. 1460), had grown up with the generation that succeeded Aljubarrota, and from his earliest years imbibed the national enthusiasm of the time. He had himself seen Nun’ Alvarez as a young man and the heroes who had fought in a hundred fights to free their country from a foreign yoke, and he had listened to many a tale of Lisbon’s sufferings during the great siege.[162] Since 1418, at latest, he was employed in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo (the State Archives), for in that year he was appointed keeper of the documents (escrituras) there. Sixteen years later, King Duarte, who as prince encouraged him to collect materials for the work,[163] entrusted him with the task of writing the chronicles of the Kings of Portugal (poer em caronycas as estorias dos reys), and at the same time (March 19, 1434[164]) assigned him a salary of 14,000 réis. His work at the Torre do Tombo covered a period of over thirty years. He won and kept the confidence of three kings, was secretary to João I (escrivam dos livros) and to the Infante Fernando (escrivam da puridade), whose will exists in Lopez’ handwriting.[165] His son Martinho accompanied the Infante to Africa as doctor, and died (1443) in prison soon after the prince. The last document signed by Lopez as official is dated 1451; in July 1452 he seems to have resigned his position at least temporarily, and on June 6, 1454, he was definitely superseded by Zurara as being ‘so old and weak that he cannot well fulfil the duties of his post’. That he lived for at least five years more we know from the existence of a document (July 3, 1459) referring to the pretensions of an illegitimate son of Martinho which Fernam Lopez rejected.[166] Of the chronicles of the first ten Kings of Portugal written by Lopez[167] only three survive: the Cronica del Rei Dom Joam de boa memoria, Cronica del Rei Dom Fernando, and Cronica del Rei Dom Pedro. The latter is but a brief sketch, and lacks the unity which the subject-matter gives to the other two. His chronicles of the seven earlier kings disappeared in the revised versions of subsequent historians. Although they no doubt incorporated large slices of his work with little alteration, the freshness and the style are gone, the good oak hidden beneath coats of paint. It was a proceeding the more deplorable in that Lopez had been at great pains to discover and record the truth, ‘the naked truth’.[168] His successor, Zurara, represents him as ‘a notable person’, ‘a man of some learning and great authority’;[169] he travelled through the whole of Portugal to collect information and spent much time in visiting churches and convents in search of papers and inscriptions, while King Duarte had documents brought from Spain for his use. Whatever sources he utilized, Latin, Spanish, or Portuguese, he stamped his work with his own individuality. He himself frequently refers to previous historians, and often expresses his disapproval of their methods.[170] He seems to have drawn largely from a Latin work of a certain Dr. Cristoforus. Keenly alive to the dignity and responsibilities of history, he was anxious that his work should be well ordered and philosophical.[171] He has been called the Portuguese Froissart, but he combines with Froissart’s picturesqueness moral philosophy, enthusiasm, and high principles, is in fact a Froissart with something of Montaigne added, and easily excels Giovanni Villani or Pero López de Ayala. The latter must descend from the pedestal given him by Menéndez y Pelayo,[172] since he only occasionally rises to the height of Fernam Lopez, as in the account of the murder of the Infante Fradique, which Lopez copies very closely (although abbreviating it as really foreign to his history), evidently appreciating such dramatic touches as the sentence which describes how, as the murdered man advanced through the palace, ever fewer went in his company. By the side of the laborious prose and precocious wisdom of King Duarte this child of genius seems to give free rein to his pen, but it is his greatness and his title to rank above all contemporary chroniclers, not only of Portugal but of Europe, that he could combine this spontaneity with the scruples of an accurate historian, and be at once careful and impetuous, or, as Goes calls him, copious and discreet. He assigns speeches of considerable length to the principal actors, but they contain not mere rhetoric[173] but arguments such as might well have been used; and the frequent shorter sayings of humbler persons, often anonymous and as illuminating as graffiti, have the stamp of truth and bring the scenes most clearly before us. Indeed, every sentence is living; his unfailing qualities are rapidity and directness. Sometimes the sound of galloping horses or the loud murmur of a throng of men is in his pages. He ever and anon rivets the reader’s—the listener’s—attention by some captivating phrase, by his quaintly expressed wisdom, by his personal keenness and delight in the ‘marvellous deeds of God’ (maravilhas que Deos faz) or in the actions of his heroes (Oo que fremosa cousa era de veer!). His chronicles are not only a succession of imperishably vivid scenes—King Pedro dancing through his capital by night, the escape of Diogo Lopez, the punishment of D. Inés’ murderers, the siege of Lisbon, the murder of D. Maria Tellez—but describe fully and with skilful care the character of the actors, pleasure-loving King Ferdinand, cunning, audacious, and accomplished Queen Lianor Tellez, wise and noble Queen Philippa, even morose Juan I, and principally the popular Mestre d’Avis and his great Constable, Nun’ Alvarez Pereira. And the Portuguese people is delineated both collectively and as individuals, in its generous enthusiasm, unreasoning impetuosity, and atrocious anger. That Lopez paid attention to his style is proved by his modest disclaimer bidding the reader expect no fremosura e afeitamento das pallavras, but merely the facts breve e sãamente contados, em bom e claro estilo. His style is always clear and natural, the serviceable handmaid of his subject, admirably assuming the colour and sound of the events described, and his longest sentences are never obscure. He wrote his history on a generous scale, for in the rapidity of his descriptions this inimitable story-teller preserved his leisure. His last chronicle ended with the expedition to Ceuta (1415). The kernel of that chronicle had been the illustrious deeds and character of Nun’ Alvarez, also described in the hitherto anonymous Coronica do condestabre de purtugal, of which the earliest edition is dated 1526. Large tracts of this chronicle are included, with alterations, in Lopez’ Chronicles of King Fernando and King João I. Dr. Esteves Pereira and Snr. Braamcamp Freire have now independently come to the conclusion that it is the work of Lopez, clearly an earlier work[174] written shortly after the death of Nun’ Alvarez (1431), i. e. before he concluded the Cronica de D. Fernando[175] and wrote the Cronica de D. Joam, at which he was working in 1443.[176] We are forced to accept this view, although of course it is no argument to say that the conscientious and scrupulous Fernam Lopez could not be a plagiarist since it was the duty of the official chronicler of the day to incorporate the best work of other historians. Lopez’ authorship is borne out by two passages which at a first glance seem to refute it. In chapter 55 of the Cronica de D. Joam (1915 ed., p. 120) he introduces the version given in the Cronica do Condestabre (cap. 22) with the words ‘now here some say’ (ora aqui dizem algũs), and then cites huũ outro estoriador, cujo fallamento nos pareçe mais rrazoado, i. e. he now rejects the version (of algũs) which he had adopted in his earlier work. In chapter 152 (1915 ed., p. 281) he similarly quotes what dizem aqui algũs and then the version of huũ outro compillador destes feitos, de cujos garfos per mais largo estillo exertamos nesta obra segundo que compre, rrecomta isto per esta maneira, a manner which is not that of the Cronica do Condestabre. But indeed the style of the two works is conclusive. A single age does not produce two Fernam Lopez any more than it produces two Montaignes or two Malorys. Those who read the continuation of the Cronica de D. Joam (i. e. the Cronica da Tomada de Ceuta, completed in 1450) by Gomez Eanez de Zurara (c. 1410-74) find themselves in a very different atmosphere. We are told[177] that this soldier, turned historian, acquired his learning late in life, and he parades it like a new toy. Aristotle, Avicenna, and all the Scriptures are in his preface; Job, Ovid, Hercules, and Xenophon, a motley company, mourn the death of Queen Philippa (cap. 44). Sermons extend over whole chapters, although, as he is careful to state, the exact words of the preachers could not be given.[178] Philosophy had been graciously woven into Lopez’ narrative, but here it stands in solid icebergs interrupting the story. And if he wishes to say that memory often fails in old age he must quote St. Jerome; a date occupies half a page, being calculated in nine or ten eras;[179] and the style is sometimes similarly inflated, so that ‘next morning’ becomes ‘When Night was bringing the end of its obscurity and the Sun began to strike the Oriental horizon’ (cap. 92). He also delights in elaborate metaphors.[180] But it must not be thought that Zurara is all froth and morals: in between his purple patches and erudite allusions he tells his story directly and vividly, and, what is more, he has his enthusiasm and his hero. Nun’ Alvarez has faded into the background, but in his place appears the intense and fervent spirit of Prince Henry the Navigator. His partiality for Prince Henry appears in the Cronica de D. Joam, and in his Cronica do Descobrimento e Conquista da Guiné it is still more evident.[181] In this chronicle, written at the request of King Afonso V and finished in the king’s library in February 1453, he made use of a lost Historia das Conquistas dos Portugueses by Afonso Cerveira, and profited by much that he had heard from the Infantes Pedro and Henrique and other makers of history. For Zurara was a sincere and painstaking historian,[182] and when the king bade him record the deeds of the Meneses in Africa (the Cronica do Conde D. Pedro de Meneses was completed in 1463, and the Cronica dos Feitos de D. Duarte de Meneses about five years later) he was not content with the ‘recollections of courtiers’, but set out for Africa (August 1467) and spent a whole year there gathering material at first hand. An affectionate letter[183] from King Afonso to the historian in his voluntary exile shows the pleasant relations existing between the liberal king and his grateful librarian. He praises him as well learned in the arte oratoria,[184] and for undertaking of his own free will a journey which was imposed on others as a punishment, and promises to look after the interests of his sister while he is away. Zurara was a Knight of the Order of Christ, with a comenda near Santarem, owned other property, and suffered himself to be adopted by a wealthy furrier’s widow, an unusual proceeding for a person in his station. But if, as this indicates, he had a love of riches (satisfied by the king’s generosity and this fortunate adoption), this in no way interfered with his work of collecting and verifying evidence nor affects the truth of his chronicles. He had proposed to write that of Afonso V, but the king, wisely considering that his reign was not yet over, refused his consent,[185] and this chronicle was reserved for the pen of Ruy de Pina (c. 1440-1523?).[186] Herculano’s ‘crow in peacock’s feathers’ has been somewhat harshly treated by modern critics. Not he but the taste and fashion of his time was to blame if he laid desecrating hands on the invaluable chronicles of Fernam Lopez, and thus became the ‘author’ of the chronicles of the six kings, Sancho I to Afonso IV. The mischief is irreparable, but it is well at least that these chronicles should have been dealt with by Ruy de Pina, and not, for instance, by the uncritical Duarte Galvão (c. 1445-1517); the friend of Afonso de Albuquerque, who died in the Arabian Sea when on his way as Ambassador to Ethiopia, and who as Cronista Môr revised the Cronica de D. Afonso Henriquez (1727). Ruy de Pina has further been attacked because the people no longer figures, and the king figures too prominently, in the chronicles for which he was more directly responsible: Cronica de D. Duarte, Cronica de D. Afonso V, and Cronica de D. João II. That is to censure him for faithfully recording the changed times and not writing as if he were his own grandfather. Pina was no flatterer, but the chronicle of João II inevitably centred round the king, and, in spite of its excellence and of the moving incident of Prince Afonso’s death, is less attractive than those which are a record of freer, jollier times. Born at Guarda, of a family originally Aragonese, Pina served as secretary on an embassy to Castille in 1482 and on two subsequent occasions, and in the same capacity in a special mission to the Vatican in 1484. He became secretary (escrivão da nossa camara) to King João II, and succeeded Lucena as Cronista Môr in 1497. Both King João II and King Manuel showed their appreciation of his services, and Barros lent authority to a foolish story that Afonso de Albuquerque sent him rubies and diamonds from India as a reminder, in Corrêa’s phrase, to glorificar as cousas de Afonso de Albuquerque. Ruy de Pina in his chronicles of King Duarte and Afonso V used material collected by Fernam Lopez and Zurara, and he in turn left material for the reign of King Manuel of which Damião de Goes availed himself, while his Cronica de D. João II was laid under contribution by Garcia de Resende. It may be doubted whether the Cronica de D. Afonso V contains much that is not Ruy de Pina’s own. It was poetical justice that the interest of the story should be transferred from the Infante Henrique to the Infante Pedro.[187] His death and that of the Conde de Abranches at Alfarrobeira are told with the most impressive simplicity, which produces a far greater effect than the long exclamação that follows. Lacking Lopez’ genius, but possessed of an excellent plain style, which only becomes flowery on occasion, and on his guard against what he calls the vicio e avorrecimento da proluxidade, Pina relates his story straightforwardly, almost in the form of annals. He does not attempt to eke out his matter with rhetoric and has chapters of under fifty words. The Cronica de D. Afonso V effectively contrasts the characters of the weak and chivalrous Afonso, who is praised as man but not as king, and the vigorous practical João II, and has an inimitable scene of the meeting of the former and Louis XI at Tours in 1476. The glow of Fernam Lopez is absent, but Pina none the less deserves to be accounted an able and impartial historian.

To the fifteenth century belongs the Cronica do Infante Santo. It is impossible to read unmoved the clear and unaffected story of the sufferings and death (1437-43), as a captive of Fez, of this the most saintly of the sons of King João I and Queen Philippa. It was written at the bidding of his brother, Prince Henry the Navigator, with the skill born of a fervent devotion, by Frei João Alvarez, an eyewitness[188] of D. Fernando’s misfortunes and one of the few of his companions to survive (till 1470 or later). A curious indication of the writer’s accuracy in detail is the correct spelling of a Basque name,[189] of the meaning of which he was probably ignorant.

The founder of the dynasty of Avis, King João I (1365-1433), found time in his busy reign of forty-eight years to encourage literature, ardently assisted no doubt by English Queen Philippa, and was himself an author. His keen practical spirit turned to Portuguese prose, and while as a poet he confined himself to a few prayers and psalms, in prose he caused to be translated the Hours of the Virgin and the greater part of the New Testament, as well as foreign works such as John Gower’s Confessio Amantis (c. 1383), and himself wrote a long treatise on the chase. This Livro da Montaria, which has little but the title in common with Alfonso XI’s Libro de Montería, lay unpublished for four centuries, but is now available in a scholarly edition by Dr. Esteves Pereira from the manuscript in the Lisbon Biblioteca Nacional. Valuable and interesting in itself, this book is of great significance in Portuguese literature by reason of the impulse thus given to Portuguese prose. It is impossible as yet to estimate the full value of the prose works that followed: many are lost, others remain in manuscript, as the Orto do Sposo by Frei Hermenegildo de Tancos, or the Livro das Aves. But with King João’s son and successor Portuguese prose came into its kingdom.

Punctilious and affectionate, gifted with many virtues and graces, the half-English King Duarte (1391-1438), o Eloquente, shared the high ideals of all the sons of João I. Liable to fits of melancholy, and of less active disposition than his brothers Henrique and Pedro, he proved himself not less gallant in action than they at the taking of Ceuta in 1415, and had even earlier been entrusted by his father with affairs of State. His scruples as philosopher-or rather student-king during his unhappy reign of five years may have hampered his decisions, but his love of truth made the saying palavra de rei proverbial. The corroding cares of State prevented him from giving all the time he would have wished to literary studies, but he was a methodical collector of books[190] and papers written by himself and others, and his great work, Leal Conselheiro (c. 1430), consisted of such a collection on moral philosophy and practical conduct, addressed to his wife, Queen Lianor. It contains 102 chapters, often stray papers, sometimes translated from other authors.[191] Besides a detailed consideration of virtues and vices which are treated with an Aristotelian precision, and always with preference for the Portuguese as opposed to the latinized word, it has chapters on the art of translation, food, chapel services, and other subjects.[192] The book reveals a character of rare charm, combining humility with a clear instinct for what was right, humanity with common sense. His literary genius was akin to that of his father; he scarcely possessed poetical talent, although he translated in verse the Latin hymn Juste Judex, and possessed in his library a Livro das Trovas del Rei, in all probability a collection of the poems of others. Wit and originality he also lacked. But as a prose-writer he ranks among the greatest Portuguese authors, and in style was indeed something of an innovator, using words with an exactness and scrupulous nicety hitherto unknown in Portugal. He gave the matter long and serious consideration, and the directness of his style corresponds to his sincerity of thought. His clear, concise sentences and careful choice of words show a true artist of unerring instinct in prose.[193] King Duarte wished to be read as Sainte-Beuve recommended that one should read the Caractères of La Bruyère: peu et souvent (pouco ... tornando algũas vezes). The first part of the precept has been followed, but unhappily for Portuguese prose the second has been neglected. In his youth the king was noted for his horsemanship, and his Livro da Ensinança de bem cavalgar toda sella is a practical treatise based on his personal experience (nom screvo do que ouvi, as he says) begun when he was prince, laid aside after his accession, and left unfinished at his death. It is remarkable, like the Leal Conselheiro, for the excellence of its style and the manly, thoughtful character of its author. But for his premature death, King Duarte might have done for Portuguese prose what Alfonso X and Don Juan Manuel had done for Castilian. An excellent translator himself, he encouraged translations into Portuguese, in Portugal and Spain; the Bishop of Burgos, Don Alonso de Cartagena, translated Cicero for him, and the Dean of Santiago Aristotle. More active than King Duarte, more literary than his younger brother Prince Henry the Navigator (1394-1460), D. Pedro (1392-1449), created Duke of Coimbra after the capture of Ceuta in 1415, became almost a legendary figure owing to his extensive travels (1424-8)—andou as sete partes do mundo—and his equally exaggerated reputation as a poet, through confusion with his son the Constable. Regent from 1438 to 1448, he resigned when the young king, his nephew and son-in-law, Afonso V, came of age. His enemies succeeded in effecting his banishment from Court. Civil strife followed, and D. Pedro fell in a preliminary skirmish at Alfarrobeira in May 1449. Had he been granted a peaceful old age he would probably occupy a more important place in Portuguese literature. Apart from the historical value of his letters, his chief claim to be remembered literarily consists in the translations from the Latin, principally from Cicero, undertaken under his supervision or by himself personally, as the De Officiis, which was dedicated to King Duarte and is still unpublished. The Trauctado da Uirtuosa Benfeyturia was originally a translation by the prince of Seneca’s De Beneficiis. Except the dedication to King Duarte (between 1430 and 1433), the work as it stands in six books is properly not D. Pedro’s, since he had not leisure for the corrections and additions which he wished to make, and accordingly handed over his translation and the original to his confessor, Frei João Verba, who made the necessary alterations,[194] and expanded the book from a literal translation to a paraphrase of the De Beneficiis. The reader who does not bear this in mind might be startled to find references in a work of Seneca’s to St. Thomas, Nun’ Alvarez, the noble knight Abraham, or the virtuous knight Cid Ruy Diaz. The work lacks King Duarte’s gift of style which set the Leal Conselheiro high above contemporary prose.

Lopo de Almeida, created first Count of Abrantes in 1472,[195] accompanied D. Lianor, daughter of King Duarte, on her marriage to the Emperor Frederick III in 1451. In four letters written to King Afonso V from Italy (February to May 1452) he displays a keen eye for colour and much directness in description, so that the Emperor bargaining miserly over the price of damask or the two wealthy Italian dukes so sorrily horsed (em sima de senhos rocins magros) remain in the memory, and the letters are more original than most of the Portuguese prose of the century.

One of the most important early prose works is the Boosco Delleytoso (1515). It consists of 153 short chapters,[196] and is dedicated (on the verso of the frontispiece portraying the ‘delightful wood’) to Queen Lianor, widow of King João II. It is a homily in praise of the hermit’s life of solitude and against worldly joys and traffics, and is marked by a pleasant quaintness, an intense and excellent style, a fervent humanity and love of Nature. The hermit’s independent and healthy life[197] is contrasted with that of the merchant in cities.[198] In chapter I the repentant sinner is introduced in ‘a very thick wood of very fair trees in which many birds sang very sweetly’ near ‘a very fair field full of many herbs and scented flowers’—frolles de boo odor. He prays to be delivered from this darkness of death, and a very fair youth appears ‘clothed in clothes of gleaming fire and his face shone as the sun when it rises in the season of great heat’. His ‘glorious guide’, grorioso guyador, leads him to a dona sabedor and to dom francisco solitario, who in a fremoso fallamento praises the solitary life and condemns those who are puffed up with the conceit of learning, in itself ‘a very fair thing’. He tells of the lives of saintly hermits; St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dom Seneca, Dom Cicero, a mui comfortosa donzella, and others exhort the sinner to leave the world, and he ends by relating his frequent raptures until his soul is carried to the terra perduravil. In its main subject, praise of the solitary life, the book recalls the title of the treatise ascribed to D. Philippa de Lencastre: Tratado da Vida Solitaria, a translation or adaptation from the Latin of Laurentius Justinianus.[199] The latter’s De Vita Solitaria is, however, quite different from the Boosco deleytoso, which was probably composed before the birth of D. Philippa (1437).

Another remarkable early work is the anonymous Corte Imperial (14th or early 15th c.), the language of which often bears traces of a Latin original.[200] Many of its sentences are veritable dobres and mordobres in prose,[201] and to a superficial reader will have little meaning; but in fact this mystic treatise is closely reasoned. It may have some connexion with similar works by Juda Levi, Ramon Lull, and Don Juan Manuel. In a corte or parliament the Church Militant, in the person of a ‘glorious Catholic Queen’ argues with Gentile, Moor, and Jew on the nature of God and the Trinity. The Gentiles and Moors gradually accept her doctrines, but the Jewish rabbis prove more contumacious. Saints and angels and all the company of heaven discourse sweet music in the intervals of the discussion. One of the best known of the many other important translations of this time was the Flos Sanctorum (1513),[202] which begins[203] with extracts from the Gospels and has a savour of the Bible about its prose. There were many later versions of the Gospel story, as A Paxã de Jesu Christo Nosso Deos e Senhor, &c. (1551); Tratado en que se comprende breue e deuotamente a Vida, Paixão e Resurreição, &c. (1553); Traatado em q̃ se contẽ a paixam de x̃po, &c. (1589?). But the earliest and most splendid, an incunable of which Portugal has reason to be proud on account of its beautiful print, is the Vita Christi (Lixboa, 1495), translated em lingoa materna e portugues linguagem from the original of Ludolph von Sachsen by the Cistercian monk Frei Bernardo de Alcobaça (†1478?), at the bidding of Queen Isabel, sister of the Constable D. Pedro, in the middle of the fifteenth century (1445).

Another notable translation for the same queen is the Espelho de Christina (1518),[204] from the French of Christine de Pisan: Livre des trois vertus pour l’enseignement des princesses (1497). The Portuguese manuscript, translated from the French manuscript nearly half a century before the latter appeared in print,[205] was published at the bidding of Queen Lianor (wife of João II), who so keenly encouraged Portuguese art, language, and literature. Her squire Valentim Fernandez’ version of Marco Polo, Marco Paulo, was published at Lisbon in 1502. The Espelho de Prefeyçam (1533) was translated from the Latin by the Canons of Santa Cruz, Coimbra, and edited by Bras de Barros (c. 1500-59), Bishop of Leiria and cousin of the historian João de Barros. A Portuguese version of a scriptural work entitled Sacramental, originally written in Spanish by Clemente Sanchez de Vercial, was published apparently in 1488 (it would thus be one of the earliest books printed in Portugal), and was reprinted at Lisbon in 1502.

FOOTNOTES:

§ 4 The Cancioneiro Geral

The silence that falls on Portuguese poetry after the early Cancioneiros lasts for over a century, scarcely interrupted by the twilight murmurings of the later Galician poets, and is only broken for us by the publication of the Cancioneiro Geral five years before the death of King Manuel. The native trovas had no doubt continued to be written by many poets in a country where poetry is scarcely rarer than prose, far commoner than good prose. But no one had cared to preserve them in a collection corresponding to the Cancionero de Baena in Spain. When Portuguese poetry again emerges into the clear light of day Spanish influence is in full swing and behind it looms that of Italian poetry, the natural continuation of one side of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana. No Spanish poet now writes in Portuguese, many Portuguese in Spanish. Popular poetry and royal troubadours have alike disappeared, leaving a narrow circle of Court rhymesters. It is to one of these that we owe the collection which embraces the poetry of the day, from the middle of the fifteenth century to the actual year of publication, 1516. Stout, good-natured Garcia de Resende (c. 1470-1536), a favourite alike with king and courtiers, often the butt of the Court poets’ wit—he is a tunny, a barrel, a wineskin, a melon in August—belonged to an old family which in the sixteenth century distinguished itself in literature. Born at Evora and brought up in the palace as page and then as secretary of King João II, he had every opportunity of observing the events which he so graphically describes in his Vida de Dom João II (1545).[206] Talented and many-sided, Resende continued in high favour during the succeeding reigns: in 1498 as secretary he accompanied King Manuel to Castille and Aragon, and in 1514 was chosen for the much coveted post of secretary to Tristão da Cunha’s mission to Rome with wonderful presents for Pope Leo X. Resende not only drew and wrote verses but was a musician and an accomplished singer: de tudo intende laughed his friend Gil Vicente. Perhaps it only required the stress of adversity to inspire to greatness this blunted, prosperous courtier—fidalgo da casa del Rei. He was not a great poet, although he excelled the Court poets of the fifteenth century. As historian he has been unjustly condemned. If in his Chronicle of João II he made use of Ruy de Pina’s manuscript chronicle, first published in 1792, it must be remembered that it was customary for the official historians to regard their predecessors as existing mainly for purposes of plagiarism. Herculano called Resende’s chronicle a poor bundle of anecdotes,[207] and no doubt Resende was not a Herculano nor a Fernam Lopez but a more limited Court chronicler. He is none the less delightful because he deals not in tendencies and abstractions but in concrete details and persons, Court persons. With an artist’s eye for the picturesque he makes his readers see the event described, and his chronicle is throughout singularly vivid and dramatic. He is certainly an attractive writer, and perhaps he is also instructive. The incident, for instance, of the Duke of Braganza being kept waiting while a scaffold of the latest Paris pattern is being erected for his execution (1483), which a grander historian might have omitted, is possibly not without its significance and shows francesismo in action four centuries before Eça de Queiroz. Besides various minor works in prose Resende composed, not without misgiving,[208] a long survey of the events of his day in some 300 decimas: Miscellania e Variedade de Historias, which throws curious and valuable light on the times. His literary work was prompted by a real desire to serve his country. His delicate appreciation of the past appears in his remarkable and charming verses on the death of Inés de Castro; and wishing in so far as lay in his power to remedy the Portuguese neglect which had allowed so many poems and records and gentilezas to perish, he collected what he could of past and present poets and published them in one great volume which he dedicated to the Infante João: Cancioneiro Geral (1516), often known as the Cancioneiro de Resende to distinguish it from the Spanish Cancionero General (1511). Resende wrote to the poets of his acquaintance requesting them in verse to send him their poems, and they sent him answers, also in verse, accompanying their poems.[209] The receipt of these he would acknowledge as editor, promising, still in verse, to have them printed. Politeness no doubt induced him to include more than his judgement warranted, for his own poems are superior to those of most of his contemporaries. A large number of the Cancioneiro’s poems—some 1,000 poems by between 100 and 200 poets—should scarcely have been included, for, however well they might answer their purpose as occasional verse, they were not intended as a possession for ever, and massed together produce an effect of dull and endless triviality. These love poems can indeed be as monotonous, the satiric poems as coarse, licentious, and irreverent, as those of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana. One of the poets, D. João Manuel, like King Alfonso X of old, does beseech his colleagues to cease singing of Cupid and Macias and turn to religious subjects. But it was not Garcia de Resende’s purpose to include religious verse. Poems recording great deeds and occasions he would gladly have printed in larger number, but, as he (among others) complained in his preface, it was characteristic of the Portuguese not to record their deeds in literary form. Satiric verses he included in plenty, satire being one of the recognized functions of the poet’s art: per trouas sam castigados.[210] But if we turn to the poems of his collection we are amazed by the pettiness of the subjects, and our amazement grows when we remember that this was the period in the world’s whole history most calculated to awe and inspire men’s minds with the thought of vast new horizons. While Columbus was discovering America, Bartholomeu Diaz rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama sailing to India, or Afonso de Albuquerque making desperate appeals for men and money to enable him to maintain his brilliant conquests, the Court poets were versifying on an incorrectly addressed letter, a lock of hair, a dingy head-dress, a very lean and aged mule, the sad fate of a lady marrying away from the Court in Beira, a quarrel between a tenor and soprano, a courtier’s velvet cap or hat of blue silk, a button more or less on a coat, the length of spurs, fashions in sleeves: themes, as José Agostinho de Macedo might say, ‘prodigiously frivolous’. When news reached Lisbon of the tragic death of D. Francisco de Almeida and of the defeat of Afonso de Albuquerque[211] and the Marshal D. Fernando de Coutinho before Calicut, with the death of the latter, Bras da Costa wrote to Garcia de Resende that at this rate he would prefer to have no pepper, and Resende answered that for his part he certainly had no intention of embarking. But, as a rule, such events received not even so trivial a comment, and no doubt the poets felt that the verse which served to pass the time at the serões was inadequate to any great occasion. But the trovador segundo as trovas de aquelle tempo[212] had little idea of what subjects were suitable or unsuitable to poetry. A typical instance of the themes in which they delighted is an event which seems to have produced a greater impression than the discovery of new worlds: the return from Castille of a gentleman of the Portuguese Court wearing a large velvet cap. For over 300 lines of verse this cap is bandied to and fro by the witty poets. It must weigh four hundredweight, says one. Another advises him to lock it up em arcaaz until he can turn it into a doublet; another bids him sell it in the Jews’ quarter. Small wonder, chimes in a fourth, that no galleys come now with velvet from Venice.[213] ‘I would not wear it at a serão, not for a million,’ says another. ‘A Samson could not wear it all one summer,’ is the comment of a sixth. Another remarks that he would rather read Lucan (or Lucian) (antes leria por luçam) in the heat of the day than wear it. ‘He will need a cart to bring it to the serão,’ says yet another. The wit, it will be seen, is not brilliant, although it may have effectively nipped this budding Castilian fashion and enlivened an evening. But there were duller contests. For score on score of pages the rival merits of sighing and of loving in silence are discussed by poet after poet (O Cuidar e Sospirar). Such a subject once started tended to accumulate verses like a snowball. But the Cancioneiro also contains poems on serious topics, although they are rarer, as well as delicate, airy nothings (sutiles nadas) like Vimioso’s vilancetes.[214] There are two poems on the death of King João II, there is Luis Anriquez’ lamentation on the death of the Infante Afonso (1491), that of Luis de Azevedo on the death of the Infante Pedro, Duke of Coimbra, at Alfarrobeira, and a few poets, like Resende himself, stand out from the rest. Besides the elaborate Spanish poem by that noble prince the Constable D. Pedro we have several long poems dealing with high matters of the soul or the State. The sixty-one interesting stanzas by the querulous, satirical, intolerant Alvaro de Brito Pestana treat of the condition of the city of Lisbon and the decay of morals. The correspondent of Gomez Manrique and contemporary of his nephew Jorge, in the metre of whose famous Coplas he wrote, he was present at the battle of Alfarrobeira. His trovas on the death of Prince Afonso, with the recurrent choremos perda tamanha, are wooden and artificial and his sixteen alliterative verses scarcely belong to literature, but at least he chose themes which were not concerned with passing Court fashions. The few simple lines written as he lay dying show him at his best.[215] His friend and distant relative Fernam da Silveira, o Coudel Môr, is concerned with more mundane matters. A man of noble birth and high character, he was held in great honour by Afonso V and João II. The latter, a keen judge of men, had implicit confidence in the justice of this upright magistrate, who was also a soldier, a poet, and a finished courtier. He deals with affairs of State, writes an account in trovas of six syllables of the Cortes held by the king at Montemôr in 1477 and a short poem, on the appointment of various bishops in 1485. Or he sends a poem to his nephew Garcia de Mello with detailed instructions as to how he should dress and behave at Court. His trovas are thoroughly Portuguese, vigorous, concise, and picturesque. He is less at home in the trovas de poesia (i. e. de arte mayor) written on a journey from Évora to Thomar, but he could skilfully turn a short love poem, and for a wager of capons for Easter (with Álvaro de Brito) wrote a stanza containing as many rhymes as it has words. In fine he belonged to his age, but his poetry bears the impress of his strong character and his love of Portuguese ways. On the other hand, the younger brother of the Conde de Cantanhede, D. João de Meneses (†1514), wrote indifferently in Portuguese or Spanish. He fought for many years in Africa, although his slight love poems, fluent and harmonious, give no sign of a life of action, and died in the expedition against Azamor.[216] Another soldier, courtier, and poet marked out by birth and ability was D. João Manuel (c. 1460-99), son of the Bishop of Guarda. Legitimized in 1475 and brought up at Court with the prince Manuel, he continued to be a favourite after the latter’s accession, became Lord High Chamberlain, and was sent to the Court of Castille in 1499 to arrange the marriage of the king with the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella. In Spanish octaves he had written a lament on the death of Prince Afonso, which both in feeling and technique excels the verses of Álvaro de Brito on the same subject. Towards the end of his poem he introduces the saying of St. Augustine that ‘our soul exists not where it lives but where it loves’, which in the following century was quoted by two writers so different as Ferreira de Vasconcellos and Frei Heitor Pinto and soon became a commonplace. In other works he shows a high seriousness, sometimes a sententious strain, combined with a very real poetical talent. His death during his mission to Castille was a loss for the Court and for Portuguese poetry. By another writer, Fernam da Silveira (†1489), we have but a few poems, the principal of which is a lament for his own death, in the metre of Manrique, which he places on the lips of various ladies of the Court. His death was tragic, for, having succeeded his father as secretary to King João II, he took part in the ill-fated conspiracy of the Duke of Viseu. After lying hidden in the house of a friend he fled in disguise to Castille and thence to France, but, although he thus succeeded in prolonging his life for five years, the king’s justice relentlessly pursued and he was stabbed to death at Avignon. A favourite of João II, especially before his accession, was Nuno Pereira (fl. 1485), homem galante, cortesão e bom trovador, who married the daughter of the Coudel Môr and valiantly sustained the part of Cuidar against his relative Jorge da Silveira’s Sospirar in the great literary tournament of the courtiers. Later, after serving as Governor (Alcaide) of the town of Portel, he retired to live in the country, and presents a happy picture of himself in the midst of harvesters and pruners. He finds, he says, more pleasure in his vines, in the chase, in digging and watering his garden, than in being a favourite at Court. He had not always thought thus, for when the lady he was courting married a rival he could devise no worse fate for her than to bid her go and die among the chestnut groves of Beira. He had, indeed, made a name for himself by his courtly satire, which he turned to good use in ridiculing those who came back from Castille with a supercilious disdain for everything Portuguese. It is pleasant to find him bidding them not speak their ‘insipid Castilian’ in his presence. Diogo Brandam (†1530) of Oporto wrote an elaborate poem in octaves on the death of King João II. He also used the octosyllabic metre with breaks of single lines (quebrados) of four syllables, so familiar in Gil Vicente’s plays, and in his Fingimento de Amores (27 verses of 8 octosyllabic lines), under Spanish-Italian influence, he touches a richer, more generous vein of poetry: the poet-lover descends into the region of Proserpine, the dominion of Pluto, and sees the torments of Love’s followers. His vilancete to the Virgin is in the same metre with the difference that the verses have seven lines only (abbaacc). The spirit of Jorge de Manrique is absent from the stanzas written in the metre of his Coplas by Luis Anriquez on the fatal accident which ended the life of Prince Afonso in his teens. His lamentation on the death of King João II is written in octaves, as that of Diogo Brandam, which they resemble. Both poets invoke Death: Ó morte que matas quem é prosperado (Brandam); Ó morte que matas sem tempo e sazam (Anriquez). Other historical poems by Anriquez in the same metre are the verses written on the occasion of the transference of the remains of João II and thirty-five stanzas addressed to James, Duke of Braganza, when he left Lisbon with his fleet to attack Azamor in 1513. If we turn from these somewhat heavy pieces to Anriquez’ other poems we find a hymn in praise of the Virgin, written more in the manner of Alfonso X, and various love cantigas. The nephew of D. João de Meneses, Joam rroiz de saa, that is, Joam Rodriguez de Sá e Meneses (1465?-1576), studied in Italy as a disciple of Angelo Poliziano (†1594) and died a centenarian. He wrote a poem in decimas describing the arms of the noble families of Portugal, and translated into trovas three long letters from the Latin which by their spirit of saudade appealed to Portuguese taste: Penelope to Ulysses, Laodamia to Protesilaus, and Dido to Aeneas. He was also versed in the Greek language, and for his noble character and courtly ways as well as for his learning and poetical talent was venerated by the younger generation into which he lived: Antonio Ferreira salutes him as the ‘ancient sire of the muses of this land’. The ‘most discreet’ D. Francisco de Portugal, first Conde de Vimioso (†1549), although he did not live to be a centenarian, also survived most of the poets of João II’s reign and died towards the end of that of João III. Son of the Bishop of Evora and great-grandson of the first Duke of Braganza, he was created a count by King Manuel in 1515, and was equally renowned as soldier, statesman, courtier, and poet, ‘wise and prudent in peace and war’. His Sentenças (1605), over one hundred of which are rhymed quatrains, were published by his grandson D. Anrique de Portugal. Some of these moral sayings have considerable subtlety, and they reveal a fine character and insight into the character of others.[217] Most of his poems, in Spanish and Portuguese, preserved in the Cancioneiro are brief cantigas which prove him to have been a skillful versifier and a typical Court poet. On the other hand, a feeling for Nature, a constant command of metre, and a certain passionate sadness mark out an earlier poet, Duarte de Brito (fl. 1490), the friend of D. João de Meneses, from most of the other writers in Resende’s song-book. The redondilha in his hands is no wooden toy but a living, moving instrument. His most celebrated poem, em que conta o que a ele & a outro lhaconteçeo com huũ rrousinol & muitas outras cousas que vio, is written after the fashion of Diogo Brandam’s Fingimento de Amores and Garci Sanchez de Badajoz’ Infierno de Amor, in imitation of the Marqués de Santillana’s El Infierno de los Enamorados; but there is real feeling in these eighty verses of eleven lines (of which the eighth and eleventh are of four, the rest of eight syllables). The Italian influence, working through Spanish, was already present in Portuguese poetry in the fifteenth century, although Brito writes exclusively in redondilhas, as indeed does the introducer of the new style, Sá de Miranda, in the few and short poems which he contributed to the Cancioneiro immediately before its publication. Duarte de Brito did not condescend to those artificial devices which give us in this Cancioneiro a poem of sixty lines all ending in dos, alliterative stanzas, and other verbal tricks. The real business of the serões, so far as poetry was concerned, was ouvir e glosar motes. These glosas and the similar cantigas and esparsas, short poems of fixed form, often written with skill and spontaneous charm, were merely one of the necessary accomplishments of a courtier. Such a view of poetry could scarcely give rise to great poets, and these versifiers indeed styled themselves trovadores, reserving the name of poet for those who wrote, often but clumsily, in versos de arte mayor, de muita poesia. But, worse still, the poets of the Cancioneiro were often scarcely Portuguese.[218] Many wrote in Spanish, and Spanish influence is to be found at every turn: that of Juan de Mena, Gomez and Jorge Manrique, Rodriguez de la Cámara, Macias, Santillana. Unlike Macias, who is but a name, Santillana is not mentioned, but his influence is constantly felt. On the other hand, King Dinis, unexpectedly introduced once as a poet by Pedro Homem (fl. 1490)—invoco el rei dom Denis Da licença Daretusa—is nowhere imitated. By method, subject, and foreign imitation, this Court poetry was thus inevitably artificial and uninspired. Perhaps in the whole Cancioneiro the only poem marked by authentic fire is that of the obscure Francisco de Sousa—the few lines beginning Ó montes erguidos, Deixai-vos cair. The contributions of Sá de Miranda, as those of three other famous poets, give no sign of the coming greatness of the contributor. The names of the other three are Bernardim Ribeiro, Cristovam Falcão, and the prince of all these poets, here the humblest of Cinderellas, Gil Vicente.

FOOTNOTES: