Portuguese literature

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.