Portuguese literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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