Portuguese literature

Under the Moorish dominion we know that poetry was widely cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula, by high and low. At Silves in Algarve ‘almost every peasant could improvise’.[30] But the early Galician-Portuguese poetry has no relation with that of the Moors, despite certain characteristics which may seem to point to an Oriental origin. The indigenous poems of Galicia and Portugal, of which thirteenth-century examples have survived, are so remarkable, so unlike those of any other country, that they deserve to be studied apart from the Provençal imitations by the side of which they developed. Half buried in the Cancioneiros, themselves only recently discovered, these exquisite and in some ways astonishingly modern lyrics are even now not very widely known and escape the attention of many who go far afield in search of true poetry. The earliest poem dated (1189) by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, in which Pay Soarez de Taveiroos, a nobleman of Galicia or North Portugal, addresses Maria Paez Ribeira, the lovely mistress of King Sancho I, mia sennor branca e vermelha, does not belong to these lyrics[31]; but the second earliest (1199), attributed to King Sancho I (1185-1211) himself, is one of them (C.C.B.348). This unique form of lyric requires a distinctive name, and if we adopt that used by the Marqués de Santillana’s father, Diego Furtado de Mendoza (†1404), we shall have a word well suited to convey an idea of their striking character.[32] His Spanish poem written in parallel distichs, A aquel arbol, is called a cossante.[33] In an age when all that seemed most Spanish, the Poema del Cid, for instance, or the Libro de Buen Amor, has been proved to derive in part from French sources, it is peculiarly pleasant to find a whole series of early poems which have their roots firmly planted in the soil of the Peninsula. The indigenous character of the cossantes is now well established, thanks chiefly to the skilful and untiring researches of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.[34] They are wild but deliciously scented single flowers which now reappear in all their freshness as though they had not lain pressed and dead for centuries in the library of the Vatican. One of the earliest is quoted by Airas Nunez (C. V. 454) and completed in Grundriss, p. 150:

What first strikes one in this is its Oriental immobility. The second distich adds nothing to the sense of the first, merely intensifying it by repetition. Neither the poetry of the trouvères of the North of France nor that of the Provençal troubadours presents any parallel. The scanty Basque literature contains nothing in this kind. But it is unnecessary to go for a parallel to China.[36] None more remarkable will be found than those contained in the books of that religion which came from the East and imposed its forms if not its spirit on the pagans of the Peninsula. Verses 8, 9 of Psalm 118 are very nearly a cossante but have no refrain. The resemblance in Psalm 136, verses 17, 18, is still more marked:

The relations between Church and people were very close if not always very friendly. The peasants maintained their ancient customs, and their pagan jollity kept overflowing into the churches to the scandal of the authorities. Innumerable ordinances later sought to check their delight in witchcraft and mummeries, feasts and funerals (the delight in the latter is still evident in Galicia as in Ireland and Wales). Men slept, ate, drank, danced, sang profane songs, and acted plays and parodies in the churches and pilgrimage shrines. The Church strove to turn their midsummer and May-day celebrations into Christian festivals, but the change was rather nominal than real. But if the priests and bishops remained spiritually, like modern politicians, shepherds without sheep, the religious services, the hymns,[37] the processions evidently affected the people. Especially was this the case in Galicia, since the great saint Santiago, who farther south (as later in India) rode into battle on a snow-white steed before the Christians, gave a more peaceful prosperity to the North-west. Pilgrims from all countries in the Middle Ages came to worship at his shrine at Santiago de Compostela. They came a motley company singing on the road,[38] criminals taking this opportunity to escape from justice, tradesmen and players, jugglers and poets making a livelihood out of the gathering throngs, as well as devout pilgrims who had ‘left alle gamys’ for their soul’s good, des pélerins qui vont chantant et des jongleurs. Thus the eyes of the whole province of Galicia as the eyes of Europe were directed towards the Church of Santiago in Jakobsland. The inhabitants of Galicia would naturally view their heaven-sent celebrity with pride and rejoice in the material gain. They would watch with eager interest the pilgrims passing along the camino francés or from the coast to Santiago, and would themselves flock to see and swell the crowds at the religious services. When we remember the frequent parodies of religious services in the Middle Ages and that the Galicians did not lag behind others in the art of mimicry,[39] we can well imagine that the Latin hymns sung in church or procession might easily form the germ of the profane cossante. A further characteristic of the cossante is that the i-sound of the first distich is followed by an a-sound in the second (ricercando ora il grave, ora l’acuto) and this too maybe traced to a religious source, two answering choirs of singers, treble and bass.[40] It is clear at least that these alternating sounds are echoes of music: one almost hears the clash of the adufe in the louçana (answering to garrida) or ramo (pinho). The words of these poems were, indeed, always accompanied by the son (= music). But if born in the Church, the cossante suffered a transformation when it went out into the world. The rhythm of many of the songs in the Cancioneiros is so obtrusive that they seem to dance out of the printed page. One would like to think that in the ears of the peasants the sound of the wheel mingled with the echo of a hymn and its refrain as they met at what was, even then, no doubt, a favourite gathering-place—the mill[41]—and thus a lyric poem became a dance-song. The cossante Solo ramo would thus proceed, sung by ‘the dancers dancing in tune’:

the first line of the third distich repeating the second line of the first (and in the same way the first line of the fifth the second line of the third), in leixa-pren (laisser prendre) corresponding evidently to the movements of the dance.[42] The love-lorn maidens danced together, the men forming a circle to look on. St. Augustine considered the dance to be a circle of which the Devil was the centre; in real life the Devil was often replaced by a tree (or by a mayo). The refrain was a notable feature of the cossante in all its phases as it went, a bailada (dance-song) from the terreiro, to become a serranilha on the hills, or at pilgrimage shrines a cantiga de romaria,[43] or a barcarola (boat-song) or alvorada (dawn-song). A marked and thoroughly popular characteristic of the cossante is its wistful sadness,[44] the soidade which is already mentioned more than once in the Cancioneiros,[45] and, born in Galicia, continued in Portugal, combined with a more garish tone under the hotter sun of the South. Thus we have the melancholy Celtic temperament, absorbed in Nature, acting on the forms suggested by an alien religion till they become vague cries to the sea, to the deer of the hills, the flower of the pine. The themes are as simple and monotonous—the monotony of snowdrops or daffodils—as the form in which they are sung. A girl in the gloom of the pine-trees mourning for her lover, the birds in the cool of the morning singing of love, the deer troubling the water of a mountain-stream, the boats at anchor, or bearing away meus amores, or gliding up the river a sabor. The amiga lingers at the fountain, she goes to wash clothes or to bathe her hair in the stream, she meets her lover and dances at the pilgrim shrine, she waits for him under the hazel-trees, she implores the waves for news of him, she watches for the boats pelo mar viir. The language is native to the soil, far more so, at least, than in the cantigas de amor and cantigas de amigo written under foreign influence. Their French or Provençal words and learned forms[46] are replaced in the cossante by forms Galician or Spanish. Despite its striking appearance to us now among sirventes senes sal in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, it must be confessed that the early cossante of King Sancho has a somewhat meagre, vinegar aspect, and the genre could hardly have developed so successfully in the next half-century had it not been fixed in the country-side, ever ready to the hand of the poet in search of fresh inspiration. It is possible to exaggerate the effect of war on the life of the peasant. Portugal in the twelfth century was only gradually and by constant conflict winning its territory and independence. It had no fixed capital and Court at which the Provençal poets might gather. But while king and nobles and the members of the religious and military orders were engaged with the Moors to the exclusion of the Muses, so that they had no opportunity to introduce the new measures, the peasants in Galicia and Minho no doubt went on tilling the soil and singing their primitive songs. In the thirteenth century Provençal poetry flourished in Portugal, but so monotonously that it failed to kill the older lyrics, and they reacted on the imported poetry. In the trite conventions with which the latter became clothed the cossante had a new opportunity of life. Trobadores wearied by their own monotony, jograes wishing to please a patron with a novidade, had recourse to the cossante. The jogral wandering from house to house and town to town necessarily came into close touch with the peasants. Talented men among them, prompted by patrons of good taste, no doubt exercised the third requisite of a good jogral (doair’ e uoz e aprenderdes ben, C. C. B. 388)—a good memory—not only in learning his patron’s verses to recite at other houses but in remembering the songs that he caught in passing from the lips of the peasants, songs of village mirth and dance, of workers in the fields and shepherds on the hills. These, developed and adorned according to his talent, he would introduce to the Court among his motz recreamens e prazers. When Joan de Guilhade in the middle of the thirteenth century complained that os trobadores ja van para mal (C. V. 370), he might almost be referring to the fact that the stereotyped poems of the Portuguese trobadores could no longer compete with the fresh charm of the cossante. Alfonso X reproached Pero da Ponte for not singing like a Provençal but, rather, like Bernaldo de Bonaval (first half 13th c.). King Dinis in the second half of the century viewed the cossante with such favour that he wrote or collected some of the most curious and delightful that we possess. But although King Dinis set his name to a handful of the finest cossantes, most of the cossante-writers belonged to an earlier period and were men of humble birth. Of Nuno Fernandez Torneol[47] (first half 13th c.), poet and soldier, besides conventional cantigas de amor we have eight simple cossantes of which the alvorada (C. V. 242), the barcarola (C. V. 246), and C. V. 245 with its dance rhythm are especially beautiful. Pedr’ Anez Solaz[48] (early 13th c.) wrote a cossante (C. V. 415) celebrated for its refrain, lelia doura, leli leli par deus leli, in which some have seen a vestige of Basque (il = dead). Of Meendinho (first half 13th c.) we have only one poem, a cantiga de romaria (C. V. 438), but its beauty has brought him fame;[49] and another jogral, Fernand’ Esguio[50] (second half 13th c.), is remembered in the same way chiefly for C. V. 902: Vayamos, irmana. Bernaldo de Bonaval, one of the earliest Galician poets, and the jograes Pero de Veer, Joan Servando, Airas Carpancho,[51] Martin de Ginzo,[52] Lopo and Lourenço, composed some charming pilgrimage songs in the second third of the thirteenth century. This was a popular theme, but the two poets who seem to have felt most keenly the attraction of the popular poetry and to have cultivated it most successfully are Joan Zorro (fl. 1250) and Pero Meogo (fl. 1250). The cossantes of Zorro, one of the most talented of all these singers, tell of Lisbon and the king’s ships and the sea. In this series of barcarolas (C. V. 751-60) and in his delightful bailada (C. V. 761)[53] he evidently sought his inspiration in popular sources, as with equal felicity a little later did Pero Meogo,[54] whose cossantes (C. V. 789-97), each with its biblical reference to the deer of the hills (cervos do monte), are as singular as they are beautiful. Martin Codax at about the same time was singing graceful songs of the ondas do mar of Vigo (C. V. 884-90). But the real poet of the sea was the Admiral of Castille, Pay Gomez Chariño[55] (†1295). He belonged to an ancient family of Galicia, was prominent at the Courts of Alfonso X (between whose character and the sea he draws an elaborate parallel in C. A. 256) and of his son Sancho IV, played an important part in the troubled history of the time, and fought by land and sea in Andalucía, at Jaen in 1246 and Seville in 1247. On the lips of his amiga he places a touching cantiga de amigo (C. V. 424: she expresses her relief that her amigo has ceased to be almirante do mar; no longer will she listen in sadness to the wind, now her heart may sleep and not tremble at the coming of a messenger) and the two sea cossantes C. V. 401, with its plaining refrain:

—one can imagine it sung as a chanty[56]—and C. V. 429, in which she prays Santiago to bring him safely home: ‘Now in this hour Over the sea He is coming to me, Love is in flower.’ Beauty of expression and a loyal sincerity are conspicuous in his poems, as well as a certain individuality and vigour. He escaped the perils of the sea, the mui gran coita do mar (C. A. 251), but to fall by the hand of an assassin on shore. His sea lyrics are only excelled by the enchanting melody of the poem (C. V. 488) of his contemporary and fellow-countryman Roy Fernandez (second half 13th c.), who was apparently a professor at Salamanca University, Canon of Santiago, and Chaplain to Alfonso the Learned. Of the later poets Estevam Coelho, perhaps father of one of the assassins of Inés (†1355), wrote a cossante of haunting beauty (C. V. 321):

and D. Afonso Sanchez (c. 1285-1329) in C. V. 368 (Dizia la fremosinha—Ay Deus val) proved that he had inherited part of his father King Dinis’ genius and instinct for popular poetry. King Dinis, having thrown wide his palace doors to these thyme-scented lyrics, would turn again to the now musty chamber of Provençal song (C. V. 123):

The cossantes had become so familiar that Airas Nunez, of Santiago, could string them together, as it were, by the head, without troubling himself to give more than the first lines, precisely as Gil Vicente treated romances three centuries later. The reader or listener would easily complete them. His pastorela (C. V. 454) would be an ordinary imitation of a pastourelle of the trouvères[57] were it not for the five cossante fragments inserted. Riding along a stream he hears a solitary shepherdess singing and stays to listen. First she sang Solo ramo verde frolido,[58] then—as if to prove that she is a shepherdess of Arcady, not of real life—

an impassioned cry of the heart only comparable with

or that wonderful line of a wonderful poem:

Next she sang the first lines of a cossante by Nuno Fernandez Torneol (C. V. 245) with its dance refrain E pousarei solo avelanal. The refrain is identical in C. V. 245 and C. V. 454, but the distich has variations which seem to imply that Airas Nunez was not quoting Fernandez, rather that both drew from a popular source. The fourth cossante we also have complete, a lovely barcarola by Joan Zorro (C. V. 757):

Lastly she (or he), as he rides on his way, sings:

i.e. este cantar which is familiar in the villancico (Por una gentil floresta) by the Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458):

Very few, if any, of the cossantes were anonymous, which only means that modern folk-lore was unknown; it was not the fashion to collect songs from the lips of the people without ulterior purpose. A variety known as cantiga de vilãos existed, but it was deliberately composed by the trobadores and jograes.[61] A specimen is given in C. V. 1043:

No drawing-room lyric, evidently: more likely to be sung in taverns; composed perhaps by a knight like him of C. V. 965, whose songs were not fremosos e rimados. Like the Provençal poet Guilherme Figueira who mout se fetz grazir ... als ostes et als taverniers, this knight’s songs pleased ‘tailors, furriers and millers’; they had not the good taste of the tailor’s wife in Gil Vicente who sings the beautiful cantiga

The cantiga de vilãos was no such simple popular lyric, but rather a drinkers’ song, picaresquely allusive, sung by a jogral who non fo hom que saubes caber entre ‘ls baros ni entre la bona gen but sang vilmen et en gens bassas, entre gens bassas per pauc d’aver (Riquier), cantares de que la gente baja e de servil condicion se alegra (Santillana). The cossante, on the contrary, came straight from field and hill into palace and song-book. Probably many of them were composed, as they were sung, and sung dancing, by the women. The women of Galicia have always been noted for their poetical and musical talent. We read of the choreas psallentium mulierum, like Miriam, the sister of Moses, at Santiago in 1116,[63] and there is a cloud of similar witnesses. But whether any of the cossantes that we have in the Cancioneiros is strictly of the people or not, their traditional indigenous character is no longer doubtful. It would surely be a most astounding fact had the Galician-Portuguese Court poets, who in their cantigas de amor reduced Provençal poetry to a colourless insipidity, succeeded so much better with the cossantes that, while the originals from which they copied have vanished, the imitations stand out in the Portuguese Cancioneiros like crimson poppies among corn. It is remarkable, too, that of the three kinds of poem in the old Cancioneiros, satire, love song, and cossante, the first two remain in the Cancioneiro de Resende (1516), but the third has totally disappeared. The explanation is that as Court and people drew apart and the literary influence of Castille grew, the poems based on songs of the people were no longer in favour. But they continued, like the Guadiana, underground, and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has traced their occasional reappearances in poets of popular leanings, like Gil Vicente and Cristobal de Castillejo, from the thirteenth century to the present day,[64] while Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos has discovered whole cossantes sung by peasants at their work in the fields in the nineteenth century.[65] Dance or action always accompanies the cossante as it does in the danza prima of Asturias (to the words Ay un galan d’esta villa, ay un galan d’esta casa).[66] If it be objected that the songs printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos are rude specimens by the side of a poem like Ay flores, ay flores do verde pinho, it should be remembered that the quadra (or perhaps one should say distich without refrain) has now replaced the cossante on the lips of the people, and that among these quatrains something of the old cossante’s charm and melancholy is still found. D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos and others have remarked that these quadras pass from mouth to mouth and are perfected in the process, smoothed and polished like a stone by the sea, and this may well have been true of the earlier cossantes.[67] The jogral who hastened to his patron with a lovely new poem was but reaping the inspiration of a succession of anonymous singers, an inspiration quickened by competition in antiphonies of song at many a pilgrimage. One singer would give a distich of a cossante, as to-day a quadra, another would take it up and return it with variations. The cossante did not always preserve its simple form, or, rather, the more complicated poems renewed themselves in its popularity. We find it as a bailada (C. V. 761), balleta (cf. C. A. 123: Se vos eu amo mais que outra ren), as cantiga de amor (C. A. 360 or 361, C. V. 657-60), cantiga de maldizer (C. V. 1026-7), or satirical alba (C. V. 1049). But these hybrid forms are not the true cossante, which is always marked by dignity, restraint, simple grace, close communion with Nature, delicacy of thought, and a haunting felicity of expression. The cossante written by King Sancho seems to indicate a natural development of the indigenous poetry. In its form it owed nothing to the poetry of Provence or North France, but its progress was perhaps quickened, and at least its perfection preserved, by the systematic cultivation of poetry introduced from abroad at a time when no middle class separated Court and peasant. The tantalizing fragments that survive in Gil Vicente’s plays show all too plainly what marvels of popular song might flower and die unknown. In spirit the original grave religious character of the cossante may in some measure have affected the new poetry. To this in part may be ascribed the monotony, the absence of particular descriptions in the cantigas de amor. In religious hymns obviously reverence would not permit the Virgin to be described in greater detail than, for example, Gil Vicente’s vague branca e colorada, and the reverence might be transferred unconsciously to poems addressed to an earthly dona. (Only in the extravagant devotional mannerisms (gongorismo ao divino) of the seventeenth century could Soror Violante do Ceo describe Christ as a galan de ojos verdes.) Dona genser qu’ieu no sai dir or la genser que sia says Arnaut de Marueil at the end of the thirteenth century. The Portuguese poet would make an end there: his lady is fairest among women, fairer than he can say. He would never go on to describe her grey eyes and snowy brow: huelhs vairs and fron pus blanc que lis. But introduced into alien and artificial forms, like mountain gentians in a garden, the monotony can no longer please. In the cantigas de amor the iteration becomes a tedious sluggishness of thought, whereas in the cossantes it is part of the music of the poem.